When the U.S. military disables ad trackers on soldiers’ smartphones, fearing that Iranian agents could exploit them to cause harm, it signals that a technology has potentially outgrown its original intentions.
This surveillance system that monitors American soldiers is also tracking regular citizens. The key difference? The military has recognized the risks that can no longer be overlooked.
To address the issue, we need to eliminate it at its source.
An ad tracker is essentially a tiny piece of software code embedded in apps, websites, and operating systems. Its primary function? To monitor what users click on or purchase. It collects data on where users scroll so companies can deliver tailored advertisements for items like running shoes, air fryers, or lawnmowers—just about anything, really. For this to function properly, your phone generates what’s called a Mobile Advertising ID, which acts as a digital name tag. Every time you check, say, the weather or browse a dating app, your phone fires off this ID, along with your location, network information, and browsing behavior to numerous intermediary companies in the blink of an eye.
This leads us to a rather absurd reality: you’re shelling out hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a device that essentially functions as a surveillance tool, trading your personal habits for cash to anyone willing to pay.
Disturbing Examples
The most pressing risk for many is financial exploitation. In 2024, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services received a wave of complaints from individuals who clicked on social media ads promoting $6,400 grocery gift cards, only to find their health insurance plans unexpectedly terminated or altered without their approval. Many unsuspecting shoppers believed they were signing up for financial relief but ended up having their data harvested by aggressive lead-generation companies, leading to involuntary enrollments in alternative plans intended to generate broker commissions. Some even arrived at pharmacies only to learn that their vital insulin was no longer covered because algorithms had identified them as easy targets.
Medical privacy can disappear just as swiftly. Take the Meta Pixel—it’s a tracking code embedded into hospital websites and patient portals. Institutions like Novant Health and Duly Health and Care have faced significant legal challenges after their tracking pixels funneled sensitive health data directly to social media servers. Duly Health ultimately settled a lawsuit for $1.88 million due to allegations that the code shared information about patients’ appointments, diagnoses, and treatments with advertising networks. If you happen to search for an unusual medical condition on a hospital’s portal, your phone’s advertising ID instantaneously connects that health condition to your social media profile, creating a situation where you may see ads for treatments just as you’re browsing social media.
The technology also efficiently tracks physical locations, not just online activity. Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions against data brokers like Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla have revealed a thriving market for sensitive geographical data derived directly from cell phones. Tools like Babel Street’s Locate X utilize these mobile advertising IDs to plot them onto real-world maps. In one observed situation, investigators traced an individual’s device from a private residence to various locations, including a hardware store, a church, and ultimately an abortion clinic in Florida. In today’s America, a mere ad-tech subscription is all that’s needed to track someone across state lines—no warrant, badge, or court order required.
Reclaiming Your Privacy
This should concern every American with a smartphone. The reason is pretty clear: by default, they find themselves enrolled in a passive location-tracking network. Applications such as MyFitnessPal, Tinder, and various mobile games capture location data and relay it to open ad auctions billions of times a day. This information is aggregated and packaged, sold to third parties that create lasting location profiles of millions. Your phone records every visit to your therapist, religious institutions, divorce attorney, or medical facilities, making your daily life transparent to commercial interests.
Therefore, to put an end to this madness, we need to cut it off at the source.
For iPhone users, head to Settings, go to Privacy & Security, select Tracking, and turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track. Then, navigate to Apple Advertising at the bottom of the Privacy menu to disable Personalized Ads.
For Android users, open Settings, select Privacy, tap Ads, and choose Delete advertising ID. Doing this will erase your current profile tag and stop apps from sharing your location with advertising brokers.
The steps are quite straightforward, but the principle behind them is even clearer. If the Pentagon doesn’t trust outsiders to know where its personnel are located, you should probably think twice about allowing strangers access to your own whereabouts.
