Personalized ads in browser

Topic

New Reply

When you go to WIN-I, Confidentiality, General, you can click at the bottom to manage your personalized ads settings. It brings you to a webpage with your default browser.

Then, if you want to deactivate the personalized ads in this particular browser, you need to have all cookies including third party cookies enabled and of course not erase them when you exit the browser.

If you want to do it in your other browsers, you need to manually copy-paste the link on top in those browsers. Wow. Good thinking MS.

All of this smells bad like a tentative bs privacy thing made too quickly by Microsoft.

Does anybody here understands how it works, really? I for one would think it is simply better to ignore this setting all together and just erase automatically all cookies when you are done (and maybe also disable third party cookies at all times if you don’t mind the sometimes degraded online experience with some websites).

I think that requiring me to save cookies from the Microsoft website in order for them to know I don’t want personalized ads in Firefox instead of just having all cookies erased at the end of the session is not in theory such a great idea.

I know that probably erasing all cookies doesn’t necessarily do much in some cases as I can probably be recognized by IP next time I go online or other tricks like the old flash cookies and my “profile” might follow me anyway, but that is not just from Microsoft.

My goal is simply to give the least information about me by doing what is reasonably possible without degrading my user experience. Maybe I should run a DNS server like Noel, but that is not what I call reasonably possible for everyone. I activate do not track even if there is no guarantee it won’t be ignored, I erase all cookies upon closing my session except maybe for a few sites I add as exceptions.

I just try to understand this setting from Microsoft and what you guys think of all this. It reminds me a bit of this new feature where you have to log with your Microsoft account to tell Microsoft to erase what it got in that account, so what if you don’t have a Microsoft account and they can’t know you don’t want them to track you?

1 user thanked author for this post.

Reply | Quote

Replies

AlexEiffel wrote:

WIN-I, Confidentiality, General,

You lost me.

If you’re talking about the choice.microsoft.com settings, see this:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2956715/microsoft-windows/privacy-and-advertising-in-windows-10-both-sides-of-the-story.html

It’s been there for a long time.

Reply | Quote

Yes, I am talking about choice.microsoft.com. Sorry if the way to get there wasn’t clear (WIN-I gets you to the new settings panel, then I translated from my French version so it might not be the exact path but on AU I click on Confidentiality, then General, then the sentence at the bottom of the page).

The article you linked is excellent, but I feel there is still lots of unkown left. I was wondering if anybody had access to technical information about what happens if you disable the advertising ID but you don’t save cookies. Does it means Microsoft tracks you anyway if you don’t specifically tell them not to each time you start your third-party browser? That would be very bad.

I’m not sure the EU understands very clearly everything that is going on in Windows right now with privacy and it is hard to blame them if those things are not clearly specified anywhere. How can you sue or blame Microsoft for things you don’t know they are doing? Also, it is very disturbing that the fact you interact with anybody who uses a Windows 10 computer mean you can theoretically have personal emails or other personal information saved somewhere at Microsoft without ever having agreed to it.

Reply | Quote