Some of you may have read my post from a while ago about my going off of Facebook and why. This post isn't more of the same. Rather, I want everyone to know there is a way to block companies from tracking your online activity, thus stopping those pesky ads on your computer.
There is free software, called Do Not Track Plus (or DNT+), which will block all tracking from your computer. It gives you the option to click on social tracking buttons (such as the Facebook "like" button), but it is at your discretion, as opposed to being automatic.
If you are like me, your computer is running painfully slow while waiting for ads to download. Ours was as slow, if not slower, than our old dial-up provider, Juno--which is nuts, considering how much I pay per month for "high speed" internet.
After calling Time Warner about my Roadrunner email taking forever to load, and getting the runaround about the ad situation, I was thrilled to read about DNT+ in USA Today. I promptly got online and downloaded the software and it took about 1 minute from beginning of download to end of install.
Once installed, it puts a tiny circle in the upper right corner of your browser window, and a number appears inside the circle to indicate how many tracking attempts are being blocked for you. If you click on the circle, it opens a box that lists who was blocked. When I visited a coupon site that was linked to my friends blog, I was amazed to see that 15 tracking attempts were blocked!
I've only had the software installed for an hour, and all I've done is check my email, look at my friend's blog, visit Pinterest, and my husband visited a couple websites. And my all-time total is 129 tracking attempts blocked, which represents 8 social buttons, 16 ad networks and 105 tracking companies!
The best bonus is that the performance of my computer is back to super-fast, and I don't have those annoying ads blinking in the sidebars of websites I visit.
So, based on my own experience, I highly recommend this free software.
Click here to check out DNT+.
Disclaimer: I am not affliiated with DNT+ in any way, nor do I get any sort of compensation for this recommendation. I am merely spreading my joy at finding this wonderful product. :)
checking it out now....thanks!!
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