Turn off personalized ads on Mac

macOS has a single switch that stops Apple using your account activity to tailor the ads it shows you. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising and turn off Personalized Ads, or run one Terminal command. It is a per-device setting, applies immediately with no restart, and you can switch it back on any time.

Turn it off in System Settings

1. Open System Settings from the Apple menu.
2. Click Privacy & Security in the sidebar, then scroll to the bottom and click Apple Advertising.
3. Turn off Personalized Ads.

That is the whole change. It takes effect straight away — no logout, no reboot — and the path is identical on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. (On macOS 12 Monterey and earlier the same switch lived under System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Privacy → Apple Advertising.) To reverse it, come back to the same panel and turn Personalized Ads on again.

The one-line Terminal version

The switch writes a single preference you can set directly, which is handy for a setup script or if you just prefer the shell:

# turn Apple's personalized ads off
defaults write com.apple.AdLib allowApplePersonalizedAdvertising -bool false

# undo: turn personalized ads back on
defaults write com.apple.AdLib allowApplePersonalizedAdvertising -bool true

No killall is needed — Apple's ad platform reads the value the next time it serves an ad. To confirm the current state, run defaults read com.apple.AdLib allowApplePersonalizedAdvertising: it prints 0 when personalized ads are off and 1 when they are on. If you would rather return the key to its factory default instead of forcing it on, defaults delete com.apple.AdLib allowApplePersonalizedAdvertising does that.

What this switch actually controls

It governs Apple's own advertising platform — the ad slots inside the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks. With personalization on, Apple uses signals from your Apple Account (the apps and media you download, articles you read, and similar activity) to decide which of its ads to show. Turn the switch off and Apple stops using that activity to target you.

Two honest caveats worth knowing:

• It does not remove the ads. The App Store, News, and Stocks still carry ads; they just become generic instead of tailored to you.
• It does not touch third-party ads on the open web. Banner and tracking ads in your browser are a separate system — those are curbed by Safari's tracking protection, not by this toggle.

For ads on the web, look elsewhere

If it is the ads following you around Safari that bother you, this toggle will not help — the fix there is to stop cross-site trackers. See how to prevent cross-site tracking in Safari for the browser-side controls that complement Apple's advertising switch.