“We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to connect us all together. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one.”
"So you want to pop your filter bubble — to see the neutral, un-filtered, un-personalized web. How do you go about it?
Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets: The ad companies and personal data vendors that power and profit from personalization are far more technologically advanced than most of the tools for controlling your personal data. That’s why The Filter Bubble calls on companies and governments to change the rules they operate by — without those changes, it’s simply not possible to escape targeting and personalization entirely.
But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to de-personalize your web experience. They won’t work forever, but for now they’ll take you out of your own personal echo chamber.
1. Burn your cookies. Cookies are one of the easiest ways for companies to track you from site to site. When you visit a site that uses cookies (almost all of them do these days), the site stores identifying data on your computer. With permission, other sites can then access that data and use it to change what you see. So if you want to see outside the filter bubble, erase your cookies regularly (Google provides helpful instructions here) — and disable the “tracking cookies” that are a common way for ad networks to learn about you:
4. It’s your birthday, and you can hide it if you want to. One of the biggest challenges for personal data vendors like Experian, Acxiom, and Rapleaf is figuring out who is who. Say you’ve got the list of John Smith’s Facebook Likes, and you want to match that with, say, his voting records. How do you go about it, given that there are thousands of John Smiths out there? As it turns out, one of the most common “keys” for identifying particular people is your birthday. The number of John Smiths who share your birthday is far smaller — often there’s just one. So, keep your birthday to yourself when you can. Take it off your Facebook profile — or even just take off the year, which makes it much less useful. Revealing it rarely results in better services, but for data miners, it’s gold. (By the same token, always using “firstnamelastname” as a username also makes it easy for companies to match data about you from many different websites. Plus, it’s way less fun than something like “Dragonmachine38”)
5. Turn off targeted ads, and tell the stalking sneakers to buzz off. If you’d rather not be followed around the internet by merchandise you’re vaguely interested in, the major ad networks offer a relatively easy opt-out. You can quickly alert many of them in one place here (this is a voluntary restriction, so undoubtedly there are other ad networks that don’t abide by these rules.) You can also turn this off in your browser:
7. Or better yet, go anonymous. Sites like Torproject.org and Anonymizer.com allow you to run all of your browser traffic through their servers, effectively removing some of the signals that come through when you’re in incognito mode.
8. Depersonalize your browser. If you’re using one of those sites, you’ve turned off your cookies, and you’re in incognito mode, there’s no way that anyone could tell who you are, right? Not so fast. As it turns out, every request to download a web page reveals a lot about how your computer is configured — and many of those configurations are unique. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) makes it easy to see how unique your settings are here. And they give some good guidelines on how to make your settings harder to track here.
9. Tell Google and Facebook to make it easier to see and control your filters. While both companies provide nominal tools to access your personal information and manipulate your filters, they mostly fall far short of actually useful. This is partly because many of the engineers we’ve talked to don’t believe that this is something people really care about. You can let them know by getting in touch here:
Information Courtesy Of: http://www.thefilterbubble.com/10-things-you-can-do
Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets: The ad companies and personal data vendors that power and profit from personalization are far more technologically advanced than most of the tools for controlling your personal data. That’s why The Filter Bubble calls on companies and governments to change the rules they operate by — without those changes, it’s simply not possible to escape targeting and personalization entirely.
But that doesn’t mean all is lost. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to de-personalize your web experience. They won’t work forever, but for now they’ll take you out of your own personal echo chamber.
1. Burn your cookies. Cookies are one of the easiest ways for companies to track you from site to site. When you visit a site that uses cookies (almost all of them do these days), the site stores identifying data on your computer. With permission, other sites can then access that data and use it to change what you see. So if you want to see outside the filter bubble, erase your cookies regularly (Google provides helpful instructions here) — and disable the “tracking cookies” that are a common way for ad networks to learn about you:
- In Chrome, go to Preferences > Under the Hood > Content Settings (You can also see all the cookies on your machine here.)
- Firefox: Preferences > Privacy > Use custom settings for history
- Safari: Preferences > Security
- Internet Explorer: Internet options > Privacy
- Go to the Google homepage
- Click your username in top right and go to “Account settings”
- Click “edit” next to the “My Products” header
- Click “Remove Web History Permanently”
4. It’s your birthday, and you can hide it if you want to. One of the biggest challenges for personal data vendors like Experian, Acxiom, and Rapleaf is figuring out who is who. Say you’ve got the list of John Smith’s Facebook Likes, and you want to match that with, say, his voting records. How do you go about it, given that there are thousands of John Smiths out there? As it turns out, one of the most common “keys” for identifying particular people is your birthday. The number of John Smiths who share your birthday is far smaller — often there’s just one. So, keep your birthday to yourself when you can. Take it off your Facebook profile — or even just take off the year, which makes it much less useful. Revealing it rarely results in better services, but for data miners, it’s gold. (By the same token, always using “firstnamelastname” as a username also makes it easy for companies to match data about you from many different websites. Plus, it’s way less fun than something like “Dragonmachine38”)
5. Turn off targeted ads, and tell the stalking sneakers to buzz off. If you’d rather not be followed around the internet by merchandise you’re vaguely interested in, the major ad networks offer a relatively easy opt-out. You can quickly alert many of them in one place here (this is a voluntary restriction, so undoubtedly there are other ad networks that don’t abide by these rules.) You can also turn this off in your browser:
- Install Google’s ‘Keep My Opt-Outs’ extension for Chrome
- Enable IE9’s ‘Tracking Protection’ option
- Enable Firefox’s ‘Do Not Track’ option
- Safari’s ‘Tracking Protection’ will be released this summer
7. Or better yet, go anonymous. Sites like Torproject.org and Anonymizer.com allow you to run all of your browser traffic through their servers, effectively removing some of the signals that come through when you’re in incognito mode.
8. Depersonalize your browser. If you’re using one of those sites, you’ve turned off your cookies, and you’re in incognito mode, there’s no way that anyone could tell who you are, right? Not so fast. As it turns out, every request to download a web page reveals a lot about how your computer is configured — and many of those configurations are unique. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) makes it easy to see how unique your settings are here. And they give some good guidelines on how to make your settings harder to track here.
9. Tell Google and Facebook to make it easier to see and control your filters. While both companies provide nominal tools to access your personal information and manipulate your filters, they mostly fall far short of actually useful. This is partly because many of the engineers we’ve talked to don’t believe that this is something people really care about. You can let them know by getting in touch here:
- Google: http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/feedback.html
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=suggestions
- House: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
- Senate: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm"
SO GET INVOLVED! BE THE CHANGE!
Think of the internet as politics! Politics will continue getting worse if they dont re-elect someone. Change that! Follow those steps above to stop the interweb from being able to control our results! POP YOUR BUBBLE!