I looked at the Halfords web site to see the price of trolley jacks and torque wrenches.
Twice now when I have visited other web sites, which carry advertising, adverts for these two products have appeared.
It strikes me that the chances of this happening by random are somewhat small.
I must remember to avoid the Halfords website!
Its just targetted adverts set off by a cookie in your machine. Useyour hosts file to ground them completely.
I've noticed the same with Screwfix - even flashing up ads for particular items, such as flux, that I'd been looking at.
Maplin also now offer me the 'opportunity' to recommend via Facebook and they have correctly found my profile.
Peter
In article , Michael Chare writes
Change to a browser that can be set to deletes cookies on closing: Maxthon, Opera, Firefox (I think).
...and the millions of other sites that use the 'Google Display Network'.
It's been in operation since March 2009 so I am surprised you've only just spotted it now. What happens is that any site that purchases or shows Google ads becomes a part of this network such that your browsing habits can be tracked by Google between sites using a Google cookie (i.e. not a cookie from the site you visited). Analysis of these habits allow them (Google) to target ads at you on any site you subsequently visit that is a part of their network.
Mathew
IE can as well, at least that is what SWMBO'd says she has her version of IE set to, along with history and I think cached files.
That's a bit of a PITA if you then have to manually enter your username and password into every online forum that you subscribe to
tim
Ah, I'm out of date, my version doesn't do that.
Latest version is on a machine I look after and seems slow and bloated.
Maxthon never seems as slow but is (was?) an IE shell.
Anyway, principle is the same, lose the cookies, lose the tracking. Well, maybe not the Flash .sol files but that's another story.
Easily fixed in Firefox.
In article , tim.... writes
For me it's a price worth paying, and fred's a nice short name ;-)
Thank you, I was thinking that perhaps Halfords had set the cookie when I visited their site.
FWIW I actually bought these items from a site called
If anyone still knows how to create a batch file and copy it to their startup, this should do the job too:
RMDIR /S /Q "C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects" RMDIR /S /Q "C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys"
They effectively are insofar that they are acting as the vehicle for Google to do it. In return they get their ads featured on other sites.
Mathew
Firefox can remember passwords seperately from the cookie nonsense.
Much the same scheme is run by the other ad networks. Doubleclick started doing it years ago. They would exchange cookies when sending an image file in a banner ad. First they request your doublclick cookie that contains a unique id number. If you have one, they then serve ads based on the surfing history associated with that id. If you don't have one, they allocate you one, and give you an ad based just on the site you are on. However they then start accumulating a list of the sites you visit and can hence target ads to things you appear to be interested in.
That's why most antispyware apps will delete tracking cookies.
If you want to avoid them and the ads, just install AdBlock on firefox of Chrome, and they all go away. I have not seen an ad in ages!
If you don't like internet adverts just use the Firefox browser with the AdBlock add-on. Kills 99.9% of adverts dead. It is very rare I see any adverts on the internet - unless I happen to use Internet Explorer then it is full of annoying crap. The choice is yours. Personally I don't like to see ads and I prefer my browsing to be fast by not slowed down by downloading all these extra unwanted advert graphics.
What he said.
If you add "BetterPrivacy" to deleted LSO Cookies, plus Flashblock so you can choose whether to run Flash animations, that helps, too. Oh, and set the Firefox option not to run animated GIFs.
I used to run NoScript as well, but so much stuff didn't work, I gave up with that one.
Of course, none of this helps in the face of this;
I would use Firefox as my default if it didn't phone home every time it starts up. It may be just "checking for updates" but I want to control exactly what apps on my machine are allowed to do and when, and there is no option to disable this behaviour..
In Firefox, go to Tools/Options/Updates
Untick all the boxes under 'Automatically check for updates to:' (Firefox; Add-ons; Search Engines)
Are you suggesting that this doesn't work?
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