[Opera Tip] Disable Personalized News Recommendations on Start Page
In newer versions of Opera web browser, latest news articles are shown on the Start page which is also known as New Tab page or Speed Dials page. These news articles show latest news from various sponsored websites around the world.
We told you how to disable the news articles display on Start page in Opera in following article:
[Opera Tip] Disable News Articles Display on Speed Dial (New Tab) Page
If you like the latest news showing on Opera start page and have not turned off them yet in your web browser, you should immediately read this article.
Now Opera has started showing personalized news recommendations on Start page. These personalized news are shown using an improved, AI-driven news-retrieving mechanism. To show personalized news, Opera needs to gather statistics on your news usage and your feedback about the articles.
To be able to collect usage data, Opera displays a notification at the bottom-right corner of the screen asking for your permission to allow Opera to collect your usage data. Opera mentions that the collected data is anonymized and it can’t be used to track the information back to you. No personal data is collected. According to the terms notification, Opera gathers information on the frequency and the length of time you spend on a news article from the personal news page.
Following is a screenshot of the notification message:
Opera provides two buttons “Yes” and “Now Now” to accept or decline the terms. If you click on “Yes” button, Opera starts collecting and sending your usage data to its servers to show personalized news recommendations. If you click on “Now Now” button, Opera doesn’t collect the usage data but it may show the alert again after some time asking for your consent.
Now there might be situations when you accidentally clicked on “Yes” button in the notification and later you want to stop Opera from collecting your usage data. Or you may want to permanently disable this personalized news recommendations feature so that Opera will never show the terms notification again on Start page.
Thankfully Opera provides an option in Settings page to enable/disable sending of usage data to show personalized news on Start page.
If you want to block Opera to collect and send your news usage data, following steps will help you:
1. Launch Opera web browser, click on Opera Menu button and then click on Settings option. Alternatively you can directly launch Settings page by pressing Alt+P keys together.
2. Now scroll down to bottom on settings page and click on “Advanced” link. It’ll show advanced settings options.
3. Under “Privacy and security” section, set the option “Send news usage data to improve personalization” to OFF.
That’s it. It’ll completely disable the personalized news recommendations feature in Opera and Opera will never collect and send your news usage data to its servers.
PS: You can also disable “Help improve Opera services by sending data about trending websites” and “Fetch images for suggested sources in News, based on history” options.
NOTE: There are many other options available under “Privacy and security” section on Settings page which can be disabled to improve your privacy in Opera web browser.