Interest based content and advertising is a practice that is based on internet browsing activity and allows web sites to deliver content that reflect your interests. We aim to tell you who shares your information with third parties and who complies, and who doesn't, with best practices.

What is Interest Based Content?

Interest based content is a way of showing you content or advertisements on the websites you visit and apps you use, to make them more relevant to you and your interests. Shared interests are grouped together based upon previous web browsing activity and web users are then shown content which matches their shared interests. In this way, content can be made as relevant and useful as possible.

How does it work?

Imagine you are planning a holiday to London. You visit a website about London and view articles about places to stay and visit. On a future visit online, while reading an article about your favourite rugby team, you see content about hotels in London or an offer for transport in London. You receive this special content because you, and other people like you, have shown an interest in London. This can annoy you and decrease the quality of your web experience by using tracking technology only available on the internet – helping reduce the content that isn't interesting to you.

As interest based content is based on past browsing activity, interest based content differs from other forms of online content such as contextual advertising, although understanding the context of the content you view at that specific time is important to deliver interest based content to you. Contextual advertising is based on the web page you are looking at, at that particular moment.

What Do Those Sites Know About Me?

Click here to test how trackable your browser is.

What does Privacy Aware Do?

We aim to build a comprehensive overview of the web detailing who is compliant in best practices in their data usage and collection, protecting you and detailing sites that breach best practice guidelines.

When will the results be available?

As soon as our research has completed we will be publishing full details here showing who and what data is collected on all websites

What is the PrivacyAware Bot?

If you have seen the Privacy Aware Bot accessing your site, it is collecting basic information about the trackers, cookies and data you collect on visitors to your site. If you wish to block our bot you can do so using the standard robots.txt standard.

However, if you do we will report you as an unknown site, that may be breaching data best practices.

The PrivacyAware Bot always identifies itself with the user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; PrivacyAwareBot/1.1; +http://www.privacyaware.org)

If you wished to exclude the Privacy Aware Bot from your site include the following in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: PrivacyAwareBot
Disallow:/