How To Opt Out Of iAds [A Little]

There is no way to completely turn off iAds, Apple’s new mobile advertising service in iOS 4. However, with or without a tinfoil hat installed upon your head, you can stop those nasty, awful marketing and advertising people from gathering analytics data about your interests and the specific iAds you have watched.

“Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns,” Apple states. “If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your iOS 4 mobile device: http://oo.apple.com.”

Now, you have visit the above link with an iPhone or iPod touch running iOS 4 and, one assumes, Mobile Safari. Thereupon, you will be presented with the message “You have successfully opted-out” will appear and you will be automatically opted out of interest-based ads.

Here’s what you haven’t opted out of:

• You may still see the same number of ads as before, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests.

• You may still see ads related to the content in an application or based on other non-personal information.

• If you use more than one Apple mobile device running iOS 4, you will have to opt out from each device individually.

• Opting out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

See also: What’s new in iBooks 1.1

So, iAds will still be mining your device for location aware analytics, but that information won’t be specific to you. Further, you can’t opt out yet on your iPad because iOS 4, including iAds, won’t be available on this device until the Fall.

Apple’s throwing users a bone here, but aren’t giving us the option to completely turn of iAds. That, I suspect, is something the jailbreaking folks will have for us very, very soon…

What’s your take?