Facebook announced yesterday that in response to a report that Facebook commissioned, which found that 70 million Americans (and almost 200 million people worldwide) use adblockers, Facebook advertising code is now being designed to get around advertising blockers. So far these changes only affect the desktop version (i.e. what you see with your web browser), and not the mobile version of Facebook.

At this point in your Internet life, it should hopefully come as no great shock that Google watches just about everything you do on the Internet, and one way that they do that is with the cookies that they’ve planted in your browser (in fact if you use both Google and Facebook, it’s a good bet that very little that you do online isn’t being tracked by one or the other, if not both). This includes a tracking cookie that Google has ‘helpfully’ given you for Google ads (that advertising by Google that is known as Adsense to website visitors and publishers, and Adwords to the advertisers who advertise in those ads by Google). based on what they perceive to be your preferences. Interestingly, Google also gives you a way to modify the information in that cookie, so that Google can show you more advertising that you ‘want’ (for some value of want).