How To Remove Facebook Ads and Focus On Your Friends

I admit it. I made fun of people who rushed to join social networks (chronic skeptics raise your hand) before I eventually, sheepishly, owned up and joined them.

I can’t afford not to stay connected to my readers, I mumbled with my tail between my legs.

Now, I’m not going to lie. Facebook has turned out to be more of a gift than I expected, helping me keep in touch (at least on the surface) with friends from stages past who I don’t see on a regular basis any longer.

So it was getting a little closer to Facebook-bliss for me. That is until the day when some mysteriously-well informed ads started popping up into the sidebar. Suddenly all the warm and fuzzy-ness got sucked out into reality. Oh right, I forget this is a monetized, commercial platform…

So here’s why more ads are popping up lately. Facebook has joined forced with the big data monkeys (Axciom, Blue Kai, Datalogix, and Epsilon) to “enhance” your experience–i.e. to sell you stuff they believe you probably already like.

And you probably do. They’re not just guessing at your interests. They’re working with some inside information.

That’s why you may see ads promoting things you JUST LOOKED AT somewhere else on the internet or why you may see ads pushing items from companies you already shop at (read: someplace where they would already have your email for an online login or loyalty program and thus would be able to cross reference it with Facebook).

Pretty sneaky, huh?

But if you want to get back to “the good old days of Facebook” (Did I really just say that?) where it’s just you and your friends liking each other’s pet photos and toddler quotes and meal pics, you can install an add-on like DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery, or AdBlockPlus, to protect your privacy from this ad trickery.

And then we can just go back to sharing all our cheesy quotes in peace.