Wall Street Journal, Grad Student Rolls Out New TACO Online-Ad Blocker 0
A number of advertising companies like Google and AOL have agreed to allow Internet surfers to opt out of targeted advertising from their companies by signing on with the Network Advertising Initiative.
And Congress has begun drafting new legislation to give consumers more control over the data that Internet companies collect from them for targeted advertising purposes.
But for Christopher Soghoian, a doctoral candidate at the Indiana University’s School of Informatics and a student fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, these changes couldn’t come quickly enough.
So he took matters into his own hands last March and designed the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out, or TACO, an ad-on for Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser. TACO allows users to opt out of targeted advertising from some 84 different online ad networks, as compared with the NAI’s 34.