Because Google and Yahoo ads seem to be "behavioral" or based on your browsing history, I get a lot of ads on the browser for dating sites.. somehow they seem to know my age. Annoying because anyone looking over my shoulder sees these ads with pictures of women. Would rather have something for athlete's foot to machine tools, but there doesn't seem to be any way around this.

If you want to stop the tracking and focused ads, log out of google or yahoo as you browse or install another browser sw and use it exclusively for naughty browsing.  

Also, if you log into google and view you account you'll see everything it has on you (sex, age, location, likes...etc). You can wipe that all away and tell it not to track you. I'm sure yahoo has something similar.

If it's based on where you search, then start doing on purpose once a day to search for the things not related to sex.

Or whatever the name is for your browser of choice--there's always something like this available for any browser.

In addition, you can practice "safe browsing" as well as "safe computing" by educating yourself just a tiny bit on something called the "HOSTS" file.  Every computer has this (Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever).  If you edit your HOSTS file appropriately (don't ask me how to do this--Google is your friend--at least on this small topic), nearly all ads will disappear from any website you look at--not just porn--which is better and safer for you--as well as stressing your computer less, as it no longer wastes time and resources serving up all those dumb ads.

In addition to that, you can generally find an application/extension that will block all embedded Adobe Flash content from auto-loading as you open a website--you have to opt-in.  What this means is all those horrible ads for "F**kbook" and similar don't load when you decide to go to YouPorn or Hamster to watch porn.

You can still control how/if you want to be marketed to nowadays, it just takes a little more initiative on the part of the user to make it happen nowadays--but that's still better than just resigning yourself to be nothing but another set of eyeballs to be passively marketed to...

I'm not sure if this will completely solve your problem, but it should definitely help:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/

If you click on the right hand side of the page, where it says 'Consumer Opt-Out', the site will run a quick check of what's been given permission to track you and advertise to you. Then all you have to do is select which sites you don't want to track you, and voila! If you're using Firefox, you can also go to the 'Options' tab and choose to not be tracked. Hope this helps!

~Bianca

https://duckduckgo.com/ non-tracking search engine

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/ sends out random search requests

http://noscript.net/ you must grant permission to view any page that pops up on a site you visit.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remove-google-tracking/?src=api Remove Google tracking

Only down load these from their sites or you will get stuck with additional software, some of which is almost impossible to get rid of.

Deprived