From The New York Times: Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites

This is my favorite quote from the article: “‘I don’t think that exposing all this detailed information you have about the customer is necessary,’ said Alan Pearlstein, chief executive of Cross Pixel Media, a digital marketing agency. Mr. Pearlstein says he supports retargeting, but with more subtle ads that, for instance, could offer consumers a discount coupon if they return to an online store. ‘What is the benefit of freaking customers out?’”

Still, this is so painfully simple to eliminate…simply don’t accept cookies from marketers, or if you must (when shopping at on-line stores, for example), save cookies only per session and not persistantly; the next time you open your browser, the cookies are gone, and the marketers can no longer associate you with your last browsing session. The Firefox browser, along with add-ons like BetterPrivacy, Cookie Monster, NoScript, and others gives you extremely fine-grained control over what these slimeballs can track about your browsing habits, if you are willing to spend a little time actually setting-up and controlling your cookies.