Amazon is the largest online shopping site in the world. Not only they have their main site, they also have localized sites such as Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.ca, Amazon.in etc. When you are looking for something on Amazon, you must have noticed that you see ads of the products available on Amazon based on your searches. For example, if you are looking for “round neck t-shirts for small size”, then Amazon starts to show similar products in the sidebar and under the product descriptions. This happens because of interest based advertising settings.
By default, interest based ads are always enabled. This makes Amazon find products that a user might be interested in based on the searches, browsing and shopping activity on Amazon. If you do not want to see interest based ads (also called targeted ads or personalized ads) then you can make changes in the Amazon account settings.
You can easily toggle Amazon’s interest based ads in the following manner:
- In any web browser (such as Google Chrome), visit amazon.com or the local Amazon sites for your country.
- There is no need to login to your Amazon account. Visit the Amazon Advertising Preferences page at https://www.amazon.in/adprefs.
- Choose Personalize Ads from Amazon if you want Amazon to use your Amazon browsing data to cater ads to you. Choose Do not personalize ads from Amazon for this web browser if you do not want to see ads based on your shopping pattern.
- Click on the Submit button. You will be seeing a confirmation that your preferences have been saved.
You should note that there is now way of opting out of the Amazon ads when using Amazon. The only options you have is whether to see normal ads or personlized ads. People who are privacy conscious might want not want to see any personalized ads. Even if you disable personalized ads, they are disabled only for the current web browser.