US military disables ad tracking on troops' devices

The U.S. Department of Defense has disabled advertising tracking on troops’ phones and computers as part of an effort to protect them from threats that target their locations, according to a letter shared with Senator Ron Wyden. The letter, shared with the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command have all disabled advertising tracking across their government-issued devices, including iPhones, Android devices, and Windows computers managed across the federal military enterprise network.

Reuters first reported the letters. The military rolled out the protections earlier this year, with the Air Force implementing its changes more recently, in July. The aim is to prevent adversaries, including hostile governments, from using location data harvested from apps on troops’ phones to target them on the battlefield or at their bases. Location data collected from phone apps is commonly shared with third-party companies and data brokers, which then sell it on the commercial market; disabling the advertising ID makes an individual harder to identify, since their location data blends in with everyone else whose advertising ID is also disabled.

Wyden raised the issue earlier this year in a letter to military leaders after finding that unnamed foreign adversaries had targeted U.S. troops in the Middle East using their commercially obtained location data. The senator, a longtime privacy hawk in Congress, called the move to reduce advertising tracking commendable, but warned that the personal devices troops and contractors bring onto military bases could still expose service members and facilities to attacks.

While the U.S. government has acknowledged that troops face this risk, the U.S. intelligence community and the FBI have confirmed that they buy this same kind of commercially available location data for surveillance and intelligence collection without a warrant.

Why it matters

The Pentagon’s move highlights a growing contradiction in U.S. policy: cutting off the commercial data pipeline to protect troops from foreign adversaries while U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI keep buying from that same pipeline domestically.