Just Avoiding the Cookies May Not Be Enough
By JEFFREY ROSEN DECEMBER 4, 2012
In last weekend's magazine, I wrote about how the rise of targeted advertising is transforming online privacy and fragmenting our politics, news and culture. By describing the new technologies, which include real-time bidding auctions, where advertisers bid on the right to send us ads wherever we go online (and increasingly on our mobile devices), I tried to get at the costs of living in an increasingly personalized virtual universe. These include the "filter bubble" problem - where the ads and news we see are tailored to profiles that we can't access or control - and the problem of digital redlining, where we may receive different discounts online, or even pay different prices at the mall, based on invisible judgments about how much advertisers think we're worth.
The reader reactions to the story have been great. Many have mentioned that they avoid tracking by blocking cookies and have provided helpful suggestions about their favorite programs or apps for avoiding tracking. (I use Ghostery myself.) Here's a sampling of suggestions:
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