Securing Your Browsing Turn Off Chrome's Ad Tracking

Securing Your Browsing: Turn Off Chrome’s Ad Tracking

How to Disable Chrome’s Novel-Targeted Ad Tracking

During this summer season, Google commenced the rollout of its innovative Topics API, which permits a web browser to convey information to third parties regarding a user’s interests while upholding privacy standards. This feature, integrated into Google’s novel Privacy Sandbox, is designed to supplant the age-old third-party cookies that have persistently tracked our online journeys, reporting our virtual whereabouts and shopping preferences, among other details.

The Topics API made its debut in the July release of Chrome 115, and if you haven’t received it yet, rest assured, it will soon grace your browser. If the prospect of divulging your interests to third-party entities doesn’t quite captivate your sensibilities, fret not; you can effortlessly deactivate this functionality. Here’s the procedure:

Open Chrome and navigate to the three ellipses in the upper-right corner.
Proceed to ‘Settings,’ followed by ‘Privacy and Security,’ and then ‘Ad Privacy.’ Alternatively, you can simply type ‘chrome://settings/adPrivacy’ into your address bar.
Within this section, you will encounter three distinct categories:

Ad topics: This category surmises your interests based on your browsing history.
Site-suggested ads: It proposes advertisements based on the websites you’ve frequented.
Ad measurement: This feature shares data with websites to facilitate the evaluation of their advertising campaigns.

Feel free to click on each category. If you wish, you can pause to gain a deeper understanding of the interests and websites Google has associated with your profile. You even have the option to selectively disable subcategories within each category. For instance, under ‘Ad topics,’ you can block ‘Business and industrial’ while keeping ‘Computer and video games’ active.

Nonetheless, if you seek a more expedient solution, simply toggle off each category as you navigate through them, and you’re all set.

It’s essential to acknowledge that while this method enhances your online privacy, it’s not entirely foolproof. Individual websites can still employ their own cookies, tracking pixels, and other data-collection techniques. Nevertheless, it serves as a commendable starting point. If you yearn for heightened privacy, you might explore alternative browsers with a stronger emphasis on privacy, such as DuckDuckGo and Brave.

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