Google, Interest-based advertising, and You

Google's recently announced that they're going to start using information about user's interests and preferences to display more relevant ads. In other words, your serach history (and web history, if you enabled that) is now compiled and also figured in when ads are being considered for display on sites that use AdSense.

I, for one, don't like this. Yes, the information is analyzed by computers and never linked publicly to a name, but it's still (to me) rather creepy. There's already a rather large erosion of privacy already and this just furthers it. So, to that end, I have only three points to make.

• I've opted out of this for the ads on my blog, the RSS feeds, and the custom search pages. I don't want to make the Internet seem even more creepy than it's becoming these days.
  
• To opt out across the entire AdSense network, go to Google's ad preferences page and choose to opt out there; interest-based ads won't be displayed anywhere and Google will not use your information in this program.
• If you're sick of seeing ads at all, then either use AdBlock Plus for Firefox or set up a hosts file to block them at the OS level.

Alternatively, if you're not that opposed to relevant ads, keep in mind that site owners only get paid per click. ;)