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According to Rapleaf's blog, this site has a bunch of opt out cookies you can use: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

Nice find. Opting out by email doesn't seem that useful though. I probably have 20+ emails associated with my person, and figuring them all out will be a lot of work.

There needs to be some kind of statutory privacy protection that targets both keepers of such information and consumers of the information.

To be bypassed at all times by anyone interested in making a buck on others' data, with a bit less in the way of scruples.

You cannot prevent it all, and not all of it is even illegitimate - how can you tell the difference, if not on a case-by-case, human-decided basis? In which case, the cost would be astronomical; I'm not paying it. It'd be wrong sometimes anyway. At best, you can make it difficult for legitimate uses to exist, and do only a little to slow the illegitimate. And push them underground, making finding and stopping them harder than it already is.

Heck, Facebook can be seen as a massive deanonymizer, and they exposed way more (and more accurate) info about me publicly through their API. Their ads were horrendously inaccurate, but prior to deleting my account they were probably the most accurate measure of "me" online by an order of magnitude. And any attempt to restrict public access to the data - useful for a number of services / applications - would make lots of legitimate uses impossible.