Your Online Data is Being Sold to Advertisers. Here’s How To Turn It Off!
A guide to protect your privacy in Google, Facebook, Twitter, and more!
If I told you that your data is being sold to advertisers by most of the apps that you use on the internet, you’ll probably respond with a: “Duh… everyone knows that”. Well, here’s something you might not know. Thanks to the latest online privacy law, you can actually stop that from happening.
Starting on January 1st of 2020, The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) became effective, bringing new requirements for Californian companies like Google or Facebook which actually affect users throughout the world in a positive way.
Here are some of the new things users can do according to this law:
- You have the right to access all the data that a company has already collected from you and if you ask them to delete all of it, they have to comply.
- You can download all the data that any of the companies have on you.
- You can stop companies from selling your personal information to third parties. Any company that sells user data is required to provide the option to deactivate this feature as well.
In this article, we’ll focus on that last one. Let me show you how to change your privacy settings to stop personalized ads and keep your data to yourself.
Google and YouTube
The biggest search engine in the world is also one of the most notorious for collecting tons of information about its users. By owning YouTube and requiring users to sign in with a Gmail account, they’re also keeping a dedicated record of their video preferences. Google states that they’re not selling this data to third parties because they operate with their own ad network, however, we as users are not aware of which companies fall into that category, which means that they’re making money with our data, but without our complete knowledge.
If you would like to stop sharing your info with them, here’s what you have to do:
- For Google, go to the Ad Settings page and turn off personalized advertisements. As easy as that!
- For YouTube, there are a few more steps. Sign in to your YouTube Studio, click on “Settings”, then click on “Channel”, then click on “Advanced”, and finally scroll down to check the “Disable personalized ads” box.
As a side note, any content that’s marked as made for kids will automatically have personalized ads turned off. That’s because of the recent COPPA privacy law which aims to protect children’s privacy.
This social media king is another company known for tracking its users’ activity. Every like you give means more data for them, which they can sell to advertisers. If you want to see which advertisers have your data and are sending you targeted ads, you can do so by going to “Settings”, then clicking on “Ads”, followed by “Advertisers and Businesses”. To find it in the Facebook app there’s one extra step. Go to “Settings”, then “Ads”, followed by “Ad Preferences”, and finally “Advertisers and Businesses”.
You will arrive at a page like this:
Once you’re there you can choose to hide the ads from each company by hovering over their icons and clicking on the “X” or you can do it all at once and turn off targeted ads altogether. To do so, just scroll down to “Ad Settings” and change the status of each category to “Not Allowed” (Ads based on data from partners, Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere, Ads that include your social actions).
Once you make this change, Facebook will still be able to show you ads, but this time they won’t be targeted, so they won’t be able to share your personal information with advertisers.
If you want to go one step further with your security, I would advise you to check which third-party apps have access to your info. Remember all the times you signed up to another app via Facebook just to save some time? Well, they also keep some of your data. Here’s what you need to do to remove it:
Go to “Settings”, then click on “Apps and Websites”. Under “Active Apps and Websites”, mark the checkbox next to any you’d like to disconnect.
It only takes 280 characters to track you down. Twitter is no stranger to targeted ads and, like all of the companies above, there’s a simple way to opt-out of this feature.
All you need to do is visit the “Personalization and data” settings page and click on “Disable all” to stop personalized ads and data collection. Pretty straight forward, right?
Are you also tired of regular ads?
Targeted ads are a big concern for our privacy, but regular ads are pretty annoying too in their own right. Let me share a solution with you that will block all ads from your browsing experience, plus keep you safe from malware and tracking software.
It’s called Online.io and we developed it to cover everything users need to stay secure on the web. Oh and you can install it for free. It doesn’t get better than that.
Today we learned that most of the big digital companies that we visit every day have to give users the right to turn off personalized advertisements. Although, some of them make those features pretty hard to find for regular users. Hopefully, this guide made it easier for you.
If you need more help to stop sharing your data with any other apps or websites that we didn’t include in our list, make sure to leave your question in the comments to help you out.
Let’s take back our privacy one app at a time!
