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Want To Opt Out Of Behavioral Ads? AOL Says It Is Your Choice

AOL Will Let Consumers Opt Out of Targeted Ads from the Wall Street Journal reports that AOL will announce today a new tool that will enable AOL users to opt out of targeted or personalized ads. (NOTE: The AOL announcement is now live).

AOL has behavioral ad technology that stores consumer’s preferences and then tailors ads based on the sites’ users’ visits. AOL is expected to announce a system that will give these users the ability to opt out of those ads.


The Wall Street Journal says AOL most likely timed this announcement to pre-empt the Federal Trade Commission meeting tomorrow on “consumer-protection issues related to online advertising.”

Some more recent related articles on Internet privacy:

See also related discussion on Techmeme.

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Ad Age AOL Federal Trade Commission Internet privacy Opt-out Targeted advertising Techmeme The New York Times The Wall Street Journal
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About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.