Digital Smarts - Turning Off Those Targeted Ads

You look at a pair of shoes online and the next thing you know, ads for that pair of shoes show up in a side bar on nearly every website you visit next. Some call them stalker ads and most people agree they can be annoying and maybe even a little bit creepy. How can you get rid of them? Brian Chen covers all sorts of ways to counteract having your online shopping missions stalked in the Tech Fix blog on the New York Times site. He suggests everything from periodically clearing your cookies, to purging your Goggle ad history, to resetting your advertising ID, which is the unique identifier that Android and Apple phones use to help marketers track you. You can reset it whenever you want. On Android devices, you can find the reset button in the ads menu inside the Google settings app, and on iPhones, you can find the reset button inside the settings app in the privacy menu, under advertising.