Found a great site today that everyone should know about - youronlinechoices.com. It gives you the power to tell companies that you don’t want to receive targeted advertising online. It’s a result of some obscure EU guidelines dating back to 2011 for “for businesses collecting and using online information for behavioural advertising”, and there are some big names signed up: Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google are all listed, and you’re free to ‘tell them where to go’, so to speak. I’m assuming it uses cookies to match your current browsing session with company data, which is a neat approach.

Whilst I’m not totally opposed to this kind of data driven advertising, it should certainly be partnered with greater consumer control, and transparency on the exact data that companies are collecting. This is a small but worthwhile step in the right direction… but why has it not been popularised more widely? Have I really just missed this resource by chance?

P.S. I’ve only discovered and activated this today. I’ll keep an eye on advertisements from a few of the companies I disabled and report back if I find any trickery. If you try it, let me know how you get on; If you’re also having problems, you can report it officially here.