The U.S. military has begun stripping advertising identifiers from government phones and computers. The move comes after confirmation that adversaries bought commercial location data to track and target American forces in the Middle East.
Senator Ron Wyden released letters on September 4 detailing the changes. The Reuters report that broke the story quoted Air Force officials saying they disabled the identifiers two months earlier. Special Operations Command acted even more recently on its Windows machines. The Army had blocked them on mobile devices since early this year.
But these steps arrive years too late. Warnings stretched back a decade. And the data brokers never stopped selling.
Commercial location records reveal patterns. They show where troops gather. They map daily routines. Adversaries then exploit that knowledge. Missiles. Drones. Roadside bombs. Counterintelligence operations. All become easier.
“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” Wyden wrote in a May letter to the Pentagon, as reported by Reuters.
U.S. Central Command had already received multiple threat reports. The command confirmed adversaries used the purchased data to target or surveil personnel in theater. That acknowledgment, shared with lawmakers, marked the first official admission of its kind.
The ad industry built this system for profit. Apps collect precise coordinates through software development kits. They tie movements to unique mobile advertising IDs, or MAIDs. Data brokers aggregate, clean and resell the streams. Anyone with a credit card can buy access. Foreign intelligence services included.
Zach Edwards, co-founder of privacy ad-tech firm Decryptads, called the military’s decision positive. Disabling MAIDs keeps troop locations out of bulk sales. Yet he warned other tracking methods remain. Apps can still triangulate signals. Device fingerprints combine with network data. The flow never fully stops. (Reuters)
Wyden and Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican, sent a fresh letter to the Defense Department inspector general. They demanded an investigation into existing safeguards. Their message was blunt. Current military efforts have failed to neutralize the threat. Enemies should not buy information that helps them track American troops. (Reuters)
The Pentagon knew. Internal studies flagged the problem. External journalism demonstrated the damage.
In May 2025 the Army Cyber Institute at West Point released a technical report. Researchers examined traffic on stateside unclassified networks. More than 21 percent of the top 1,000 domains visited were pure trackers. Another 10 percent of sites carried embedded tracking code. Advertising trackers made up over a quarter of those domains. The institute noted fixes required minimal funding or resources. The WIRED story laid out those findings in detail.
Yet rollout dragged. Central Command only enabled the ability to disable location sharing on government smartphones this year. Roughly ten years after the first warnings. And the Army recently directed soldiers to use personal phones for some government work. The same phones that broadcast advertising IDs straight to the brokers.
Earlier investigations painted an even darker picture. A 2024 joint probe by WIRED, Bayerischer Rundfunk and Netzpolitik.org obtained a free sample from a Florida data broker. The dataset held 3.6 billion location coordinates from up to 11 million devices in Germany over two months. Analysis traced devices to U.S. military bases, intelligence sites and even locations believed to store nuclear weapons. Patterns exposed entry points, guard schedules and personal movements. The story showed how contractors and service members could be followed from homes to sensitive facilities. Or to German brothels.
That data came from the same advertising pipelines now linked to battlefield targeting. The military’s own digital footprints fed the machine.
Senator Wyden has pressed the issue for months. He warned the adtech sector functions as a national security threat. His office highlighted how data brokers compile information on troops and sell it openly. Lawmakers have called for broader measures. Restrict location sharing on personal devices brought onto bases. Remove Google Chrome from Defense Department systems because of its advertising focus. The May Reuters coverage captured those demands.
Personal devices complicate everything. Troops and contractors carry them onto installations. Videos posted online have already revealed locations in the Middle East. Some deployed personnel were ordered to surrender phones. The Gizmodo article noted these incidents alongside the tracker shutdowns.
A Government Accountability Office report from late 2025 examined digital footprints across the Defense Department. It warned that aggregated data from devices, communications and platforms threatens operations, personnel safety and national security. Data brokers stand at the center. They collect, package and sell information that foreign actors can weaponize. The GAO document reinforced what the Army researchers and journalists had found.
The recent disablement of advertising IDs represents a tactical fix. It breaks the easy linkage between a device and a persistent profile. Location pings become harder to attribute. Yet the underlying market persists. Apps still harvest data. Brokers still trade it. Foreign governments still shop for insights.
And. The military continues to wrestle with personal devices. Service members often prefer their own phones. Convenience wins until it doesn’t.
So the question lingers. How many more threat reports will surface before policy catches up to the data economy that powers modern advertising? The branches have acted. But the system that exposed them remains intact. The TechCrunch coverage on the same day as the Reuters story echoed Wyden’s caution that personal phones could still betray bases and personnel.
Defense officials declined further comment in several cases. The Air Force and Special Operations Command offered no elaboration. The pattern suggests discomfort with how deeply commercial surveillance has penetrated military life.
One fact stands clear. The same technology that delivers targeted ads to civilians now delivers targeting data to America’s adversaries. The military’s belated response underscores a larger failure. It failed to treat the adtech pipeline as the intelligence vector it had become. Years of studies, demonstrations and real-world compromises led to this moment.
Disabling the trackers buys time. Whether the Pentagon uses that time to address the deeper structural risks remains uncertain. The data keeps flowing. The threats keep evolving. And troops in theater continue to operate in an environment where their phones can betray them long before any shot is fired.
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