People are less than comfortable with large corporations following their every move in order to better select banner ads. It seems a bit pointless and invasive. Fortunately, you can just “opt out” and they won’t track your information at all. Honest! Really!
As you might have guessed, “opt out” apparently means to advertisers “don’t tell them we’re tracking them.” You know, because that’s what good corporate citizenship is all about: doing things the customers specifically told them not to do.
Stanford did a preliminary spot check of online advertiser behavior and — surprise! — a lot of them are violating their own privacy policies. To be fair, it’s not all of them; at least two actually respect those “leave me alone” type requests.
41 others, though, get the opt out and leave the little tracking cookie in place, so they can still spy on you, or maybe they just think you’ll change your mind about giving them valuable data in exchange for crud you don’t want on your computer. Some actively collect data, some don’t, but you’d think the phrase “opt out” would be pretty clear. Yeah, right.