US military disables ad trackers on troops' devices over location targeting fears

What happened

The US military has disabled advertising trackers on phones and computers issued to its personnel, according to letters released on Friday by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and statements the service branches gave to Reuters. The Guardian reports that the move follows earlier reporting that commercially available location data had been used to target American forces in the Middle East.

The identifiers at issue are mobile advertising IDs, or MAIDs: unique codes tied to a specific device that the advertising industry uses to follow a person's activity across apps and pinpoint their physical location. Data collected this way is routinely aggregated and resold by data brokers, meaning an active MAID on a device in a war zone can effectively place a service member's movements on the open market.

What each branch reported

The Air Force told Wyden it disabled advertising identifiers on its computers and mobile phones two months ago. US Special Operations Command said in a separate letter that it had "recently" disabled them on its Windows devices, and the Army told Reuters that advertising IDs tied to mobile devices had been switched off since earlier this year.

The Army offered a more detailed timeline in a statement: advertising IDs have been blocked on its Windows computers "since before 2021," while Android and Apple mobile devices have had them disabled by default "since at least February 2026." Letters from the Army and Navy to Wyden confirmed that advertising IDs had been disabled on military devices but did not indicate when the restrictions took effect. According to The Guardian, messages seeking comment from the Navy went unreturned, and the Air Force and Special Operations Command declined further comment.

Location data as a targeting risk

The disclosures underscore a national security concern that has been building for some time: location data harvested by the advertising industry and sold by brokers can be used to track military personnel deployed to war zones. The effort to reduce the location data generated by smartphones comes as military officials weigh increasingly strict limits on phone use overall. In July, Reuters reported that some deployed personnel in the Middle East could be ordered to surrender their phones amid concerns that videos they were posting online were helping Iran target American bases in the region.

Lawmakers request an investigation

Wyden, a Democrat who has pressed the Pentagon on the issue for months, said it was clear the military's efforts "have not been effective at neutralizing this threat." He and Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican, sent a letter to the Pentagon on Friday asking for an investigation into whether the military has properly countered the dangers of the location data trade. Harrigan argued that US enemies "should not be able to pull out a credit card and buy information that helps them track American troops." The Pentagon said it would respond to the lawmakers directly.

The limits of the fix

Zach Edwards, co-founder of the privacy ad tech company DecryptAds, described disabling MAIDs on military-operated devices as "definitely a positive thing." The restrictions, he said, "will essentially ensure their location isn't being included in bulk data sales being done by numerous vendors." But he cautioned that personnel could still be tracked through more complicated channels, for example by triangulating technical device details with network data or location information.

Why it matters

This story reframes a consumer-privacy problem as an operational-security one. MAIDs and the data broker market exist to serve advertising, but the same supply chain can serve hostile intelligence: once location data is sold in bulk, the seller has no control over who buys it. Disabling the identifiers on government-issued devices is a meaningful mitigation, and the staggered timelines across the service branches suggest the response has been uneven rather than coordinated. As Edwards notes, it is also not a complete fix — personal phones, app-level data collection and device fingerprinting remain open avenues. The investigation Wyden and Harrigan have requested could determine whether the Pentagon goes further, and it adds national-security weight to the long-running debate in Washington over regulating the commercial trade in location data.