Pinterest gets personal

Pinterest tracks your cookies
pinterest-personalization

On July 26, 2013 Pinterest announced in a blog post titled Making Pinterest a bit more personal that it will soon be tracking your web browser activity. Not only will Pinterest be tracking your activity on their own website but they will be tracking everything else you view as well.

How do they do this? Pinterest will be using cookies, a tried and true technology, to record your web activity.

They explain the use of the data a little more in this post. Pinterest will be tracking your browsing history and use it to suggest pins, boards and people to follow. They will also be tracking your viewing history of other websites and use that to also suggest what to follow.

I don’t care for the tracking and turned it off for a few reasons. First, I want to see everything in Pinterest and not have an algorithm choosing what I see and don’t see. Also, last Christmas I bought almost everything online for the second year in a row. No more battling crowds at retail stores. However, my web browser sold me out more than a few times. I was looking at bicycles for my daughter and for the next week, ads for bikes popped up until I cleared my browsing history and cookies from a few websites. Busted!

Want to turn off the tracking? Just go to your Pinterest settings page and change the button to ‘No’ (see below) and then click on ‘Save Settings’.

personalization