>almost no chance of working in the real world

Why do you think this? The company that I work for uses remarketing, and it actually works really well. I don't know the details behind it, but I know that it's a good source of leads (at least for my company).

Keep in mind that it might not work very well with you, but HN readers don't exactly represent the majority of web users.

Anecdotal evidence suggests it's a working strategy http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/01/ad-retargeter-adroll-we-qua...

I switched to firefox with noscript. Stop using chrome 90% of times. Turn off 3rd party cookie on default for all browsers. pointed doubleclick.net/com to 127.0.0.1 to /etc/hosts.

The web felt less creepy now.

There are several work computers that are shared. The poor thing is trying to advertise to is but it is hopelessly confused. Between work and several staff of wildly different interests it can't target to save itself. It reminds me of a comment on HN some time ago where it was mentioned that grocery store discount cards were randomly shuffled between friends to prevent tracking.

There's an extension for Chrome called NotScripts, which does pretty much what NoScript does in Firefox:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notscripts/odjhifo...

I don't run noscript, but I find it's just as helpful to hit ctrl-shift-P to open a private browsing window in Firefox whenever I'm about to visit a site I don't want to see future ads from.

I have a huge number of names in my hosts file. I use the MVPS hosts file but there are at least a few available along those lines. I also have facebook in it.

Although its a similar approach, I suspect that what is actually being used here is Facebook Exchange, as I doubt Facebook would let Google remarket directly in their users newsfeed.