You know those creepy adverts which keep appearing on websites, offering you products which you have either just been looking at, or are closely related to such products?

This is OBA – online behavioural advertising – and you can control it. Over 100 companies peek at information in your web browser, including things like which products you have recently browsed on Amazon and other online retailers, and then work out which adverts to place on the next site which you visit.

There is a full guide to OBA within Europe here, and on this page (for the UK) you can see which companies are peeking at your browser now. It also gives you the option of turning any or all of them off. However, as it points out, turning it off will not stop the adverts, it will just make them even more annoyingly inappropriate.

Oh – and the site is funded by the OBA companies, and needs to access your cookies. Perhaps it’s just out of habit.

Thanks to @DaveLeeBBC and @DarrenMcNaney for tweeting and retweeting this.