14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers tested some of the more popular commercial tools that are supposed to keep internauts protected against online behavioral advertising (OBA). The results are disappointing as many of them are very difficult to use or highly ineffective.
CyLab released a paper called “Why Johnny Can’t Opt Out: A Usability Evaluation of Tools to Limit Online Behavioral Advertising,” in which they highlight the difficulties regular people come across while trying to deploy apps that should keep them private.
In the experiment, 45 participants tested 9 tools. The applications were designed to block access to advertising sites and to set cookies to indicate a user's preference to opt out of OBA. The last category was formed by the tools that are built into the web browsers.
DAA Consumer Choice, Evidon Global Opt-out, Privacy Mark, Ghostery 2.5.3, Adblock Plus 1.3.9, TACO 4.0 and some features found in commercial browsers were tested.
The first conclusions were that all of them had serious usability flaws, while many of them were too difficult to configure.
Some of the software relies on transmitting “Do Not Track” headers to websites, to signal that an individual doesn't want to be tracked but in some cases sites don't necessarily follow these requests.
Other issues in these applications were represented by things such as the fact that users can't distinguish between trackers, the default parameters were not properly set, the lack of feedback and problems in communication.
When it comes to browsers, their main flaw is that the privacy settings are hard to find by regular internauts.
While studies performed in the past show that most individuals would prefer not to receive unwanted ads, it turns out that tools developed so far are not doing such a good job at protecting them.
It's known that a lot of websites track their visitors to learn about their preferences or to collect other data and until some clear regulations are made, third-party applications will have a hard time keeping us private.