US military disables ad tracking on troops' devices after location data targeting

What happened

The U.S. Department of Defense has switched off advertising tracking on the phones and computers it issues to service members, in an effort to protect them from threats that exploit their locations. According to TechCrunch, the disclosure came in a letter shared with Senator Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The letter indicates that the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command have all disabled advertising tracking across their government-issued devices. The change covers iPhones and Android handsets, as well as Windows computers managed on the federal military enterprise network. Reuters, which first reported the story and the underlying letters, said the protections were rolled out earlier this year, with the Air Force completing its own changes more recently in July.

How disabling the advertising ID helps

Apps on smartphones routinely harvest location information and pass it to third-party companies and data brokers, who then sell it on the open commercial market. A buyer of that data — including a hostile government — can use it to work out where individual service members are, and potentially target them on their bases or in the field.

The advertising ID is the identifier that ties those location traces to a particular device and person. Switching it off does not stop data collection outright, but as TechCrunch explains, it makes someone far harder to single out, because their location data blends in with everyone else whose advertising ID is also disabled.

Gaps remain on personal devices

Wyden, described by TechCrunch as a long-standing privacy advocate on Capitol Hill, first raised the issue earlier this year in a letter to U.S. military leaders. That came after he found that unnamed foreign adversaries had targeted American troops in the Middle East using their commercially obtained location data.

The senator called the military's response commendable, but warned that the problem is not fully solved. Phones and other personal devices belonging to troops and contractors that are carried onto military bases sit outside the scope of the change, and could still expose both service members and the facilities they work in to attacks.

A double standard on data purchases

There is also an uncomfortable wrinkle in the story. While the U.S. government now openly acknowledges that this kind of data puts its own troops at risk, TechCrunch notes that the American intelligence community and the FBI have confirmed buying the same data for surveillance and intelligence collection — without a warrant.

Why it matters

The Pentagon's move is one of the clearest acknowledgements to date that the commercial data broker ecosystem poses a direct physical threat to military personnel, not merely a civil liberties abstraction. It demonstrates how location data harvested through ordinary apps can be turned into targeting intelligence by anyone with the money to buy it. The episode also exposes a tension at the heart of the privacy debate: the same data streams are treated as a hazard when they point at U.S. troops and as a resource when U.S. agencies are the customers. For civilian readers, it is a useful reminder that the advertising identifier on a consumer phone is a genuine attack surface — and that disabling it is a meaningful, if partial, defence.