Do forced ads, paid promotions, and basic interference with your viewing experience on social medias and in other situations make you want to go away?

No, it's a waste of time. You're already tracked once you walk into a store or for many of us, once we start our car or just go out of home (ring cams & police cams).

For a while all of this was preventable but with cams everywhere now, it's unavoidable. Even your license plate is being run while you're at hardware stores .. and more stores to come.

The simplest and most obvious defence against the supermarkets using your phone to track you, is not to take the thing with you, or at least, switch it off unless and until you need use it.

That's of course if they are doing that. Why should they when they have a far more useful tool in examining your purchases.

It is extremely difficult to block the likes of Google. The social-media sites and many specialist, hobby, fora depend on advertising revenue to exist, even if they do not sell your information. (A massive, utterly cowardly trade based on not obtaining your permission and knowledge).


If the sites' host is run by Google or under Google's control, you can not block the ads - which are usually totally irrelevant, as well.

The ads show little symbols that supposedly are to allow you to turn them off, but in practice tell you some mealy-mouthed tripe about your "feedback" helping Google "improve" the service; and even if you can switch it off at the time, the ad soon re-appears. And often located deliberately to intrude onto what you are trying to view.


As for [anti]social-media, limit it. We do not need to live on it. I refuse to use the major companies (X, Meta, etc.); only SW and one other, smaller site.

We do not need live on our portable telephones. Mine is not linked to the Internet anyway (I am using a PC on a broadband land-line service for this); and is switched off more than on.

Any type of portable 'phone needs be trackable by the service, otherwise it could not work. It is a two-way radio of very low power, so has to operate inside a network of relay-stations (hence the proliferation of ariel masts). The network is not tracking you. It does not know where you are, nor what you are doing there, or whom you might meet. It simply tracks the instrument's location so it can send and receive signals.


So I don't worry about my 'phone use. Other precautions?

I prefer to use cash for all small purchases, but have a bus-pass so am not paying the fares directly. I use bank-cards for payments, not my 'phone (impossible anyway).

I use a mix of supermarkets and independant shops irregularly, in time, choice of shop and choices of goods (mainly food). I limit on-line buying to small, very infrequent purchases associated with my hobbies, mainly from independent retailers; and for services like car tax and insurance. So my shopping is not likely to help the advertising-agency parasites.

Besides, using cash for small purchases in independent shops, helps them because the greedy banks charge the traders for doing the bank's work for them.

On-line banking? No. Luckily my bank still has a real branch staffed by real people only a short bus-ride or half-hour walk away.

I do not get a whole lot of ads. ublock origin helps, and on the radio, non-commercial stations.

I do not even really get ads on FB

@Magicianzini Funny how they claim to track everything YET if we try to use to to our advantage, suddenly no one knows anything.
Like say someone broke into your car at said hardware store, they should have the face and address of whoever did it but of course something went wrong so they don't have anything.