[electrichead]

I would disagree that you can escape from all data mining companies. For instance, I would be willing to bet a lot on the fact that a company like Acxiom knows a hell of a lot about you that you don't know yourself. And they are not that well known.Facebook uses Acxiom, but you would never know that. You would really only look at Facebook's privacy policy where Axiom would just be listed as a "third party" in there.

It is very difficult not to be tracked at all, unless you are using Tor or other anonymizer.

Edit:misspelled Acxiom

[john61]

I did not say that it is possible to escape all of them. But if you limit the leaked data, their profile is useless. I do not get very well targeted ads. That is a good sign that they do not have a good profile of me. But I never used gmail or g+ for example.

[harel]

Retargeting companies share their cookies amongst themselves. So when tracked by company A goes to a site published by company B, company A gets notified. You are tracked, be sure of that. It might not be enough data to show you exactly the ads you might accidently care about but its close enough and closing in all the time.

[john61]

No targeting does not work in my case. Not at all. The targeting does not get better. But I surf with JS disabled when possible (you'd be surprised how many sites actually work _better_ with JS turned off) and ghostery. I use duckduckgo and do not use any Google Service or Facebook, Twitter. And yes I still enjoy a rich online live and have a lot of friends online and offline.