The U.S. Department of Defense has disabled advertising tracking on government-issued phones and computers, a change intended to make it harder for hostile actors to locate and target service members using commercially sourced location data.
A letter shared with Sen. Ron Wyden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command turned off advertising IDs across their managed iPhones, Android devices and Windows systems on the federal military enterprise network. The military began rolling out those protections earlier this year, with the Air Force reporting it implemented changes in July.
Apps commonly collect location signals and share them with third-party companies and data brokers, who then sell aggregated datasets on the commercial market. With advertising identifiers disabled, an individual mobile user is harder to single out because location records blend with others whose IDs are likewise suppressed, complicating attempts by adversaries to link patterns to specific people or units.
Wyden raised the issue after finding unnamed foreign adversaries had used commercially obtained location data to target U.S. troops in the Middle East. He described the move to curtail advertising tracking as welcome, but warned it is not a complete fix. Personal phones and contractor devices brought onto military bases remain a vector that could expose individual service members and facilities to tracking and attack.
The military's action intersects with another reality: U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI also acquire commercial location datasets for surveillance and intelligence collection, and do so without a warrant. Disabling advertising IDs on government devices narrows one pathway for adversaries, but it does not stop the broader commercial market for location information or the trade in those datasets.
For now the change reduces a clear operational vulnerability, but it leaves unresolved questions about how personal devices and the wider data economy will be regulated or managed to protect forces in the field. Lawmakers and military leaders will face pressure to close remaining gaps where commercially sourced location feeds can still expose personnel and installations.
