What is this site?

Stop Targeting Ads at Me helps you turn off the targeting of adverts at you. This targeting is usually based on data about how you behave online, who you are, or who you interact with.

If you’d prefer that data about you wasn’t used to target ads at you, you may find this website useful. You can find out the best way to turn off ad targeting and/or data collection for 48 of the websites, apps, services, or products you use without spending hours navigating complex settings pages.

You may see this kind of advertising referred to in ways including: targeted, tailored, personalised, interest-based, behavioural, ads that interest you, audience-based, activity-based, and relevant.

Stop Targeting Ads at Me highlights ways of turning off targeting within the user profile of each service or across every service on a single device. This means you only have to turn off the targeting once for each service or product you use. Your choice should then apply everywhere you are logged in, including on different browsers and devices.

Ideally, the burden on individual users to turn off targeting of ads wouldn’t be so great as visiting lots of websites individually.

There should be better options available so people can control this in a comprehensive way without needing a site like this to guide them through the depths of settings pages. This website is a stop-gap that tries to make it easier to opt out until better options exist.

Other attempts to deal with this issue

Ad industry efforts do exist to help people opt out of online behavioural advertising in limited ways.

There are industry-made browser add-ons for Firefox and Chrome to opt out of ‘interest-based’ ads from participating behavioural advertising companies.

You can also use this page to opt out of lots of companies’ targeted ads. Wait for the page to load, then scroll down a bit and click on the red ‘Turn off all companies’ button that appears on the left. This page doesn’t work properly if you have an adblocker browser add-on installed.

Both these approaches above apply on the individual browser level (eg, Firefox, Chrome, Safari). This means you have to would have to repeat these steps on every browser and on every computer you use. They also won’t/can’t affect data collection from apps, TVs, e-readers, or anything else that isn’t a browser.

Limitations

After you turn off this targeting, you will still be served with advertising. But this advertising should not be based on this behavioural and demographic data any more. In some cases, you may still be served with ads based on your rough location or the content of the website you’re on.

The websites, apps, services, and products on this website currently skew a bit towards those which are popular in the UK.

Re-using the data from this website

Except for company logos, content on this website is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. In short, this means you are free to copy, redistribute, and adapt this work as long as you attribute the original source and, if you make adaptations, share your new work under a ShareAlike license.

An always up-to-date JSON file is available which, for each of the services on this website, contains: the name(s), link to the page on this website, opt-out link(s), and opt-out instructions.

Contact me

At the moment, the best way of suggesting further companies and products to add to this site is to contact me through Twitter or to email me at hello@stoptargetingads.me

If you are keen and a (little) bit technical, take a look at these instructions on Github about how to add more companies and products to the site.

This is a personal project by Ed Johnson-Williams. Let me know if you have any thoughts about how to make this site better! :-)