Ever since the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica bombshell, online privacy has been on all of our minds. But it isn’t just Facebook that’s tracking you. From other tech giants to most store rewards credit cards, countless companies deploy similar tactics — even your favourite (or hated) forum site, Reddit.
While Reddit doesn’t make it easy to get around seeing banner ads and promoted posts — unless you buy gold — you can still limit what the site knows about you (and shares with its advertisers). To get started, head over to Reddit’s “Personalization Preferences” page.
When we pulled up this page on a new account, all of its options were set to “On” by default. We unchecked everything, because it’s pretty rude for Reddit to assume we wanted all that happening in the background, no?
The personalisation page also notes that these settings won’t apply to ads served by other companies on Reddit. (Confusing? We think so, too.) In its privacy policy, Reddit points users to the Digital Advertising Alliance and Networking Advertising Initiative as two sites you can visit to opt out of additional personalised advertising — the next two stops on our list.
Though you should enable your browser’s Do Not Track option (if it offers one) for extra privacy while you’re browsing, Reddit’s privacy policy notes that the company ignores this setting. Oops.
Limiting Reddit’s tracking won’t stop its advertising, and the ads you see will be less relevant for your interests. Depending on what you browse on Reddit, however, that could be a good thing. (And you can always make a dummy account, or two, or several, or just not log in at all, if you want to make it trickier for Reddit’s advertising arm to track what you’re up to and share that information with whoever they want.)
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