Our military turns off this invasive smartphone feature. So should you.

When the United States military disables ad trackers on troop smartphones because Iranian agents might use them to inflict harm, you know a technology has outgrown its original sales pitch. The same surveillance system tracking American soldiers is tracking ordinary Americans too. The difference is that the military has finally decided that it’s too dangerous to ignore.Stopping the insanity requires cutting off the flow at its source. An ad tracker is a small piece of software code placed inside apps, websites, and operating systems. Its official job is simple. It monitors what you click and what you buy. It tracks where you scroll so companies can serve you personalized ads for running shoes, air fryers, lawnmowers — or just about anything else you might buy. To make this work, your phone generates a unique string of numbers called a Mobile Advertising ID. Think of it as a digital name tag stuck to your lapel. Every time you check the weather or browse a dating app, your phone broadcasts this ID along with your location, network data, and browsing habits to hundreds of middleman companies in milliseconds. This brings us to the absurd reality of the modern web. You are forking out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of dollars for a handheld surveillance device that sells your habits to anyone with a corporate credit card. Horror storiesThe immediate danger for most people is financial exploitation. In 2024, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services received tens of thousands of complaints from Americans who clicked social media ads offering $6,400 gift cards for groceries, only to find their actual health insurance plans canceled or swapped without their consent. Everyday shoppers thought they were signing up for relief money. Instead, aggressive lead-generation companies took their data and enrolled them in alternative plans to collect broker commissions. People showed up to pharmacies only to discover their life-saving insulin was no longer covered because an algorithm flagged them as easy targets for a predatory Facebook ad. Medical privacy vanishes just as quickly. Consider the Meta Pixel, a piece of tracking code embedded directly into hospital websites and patient portals. Novant Health and Duly Health and Care both faced major legal actions after tracking pixels on their patient platforms routed sensitive personal health data directly to social media servers. Duly Health settled its lawsuit for $1.88 million after allegations that the code transmitted details about patient appointments, diagnoses, and treatments to advertising networks. If you look up an uncommon medical condition on a hospital portal, your phone’s advertising ID instantly links that health status to your social profile, resulting in targeted ads for treatments popping up alongside photos of your nephew’s birthday party. RELATED: In this big Texas city, garbage trucks have joined the surveillance state shaunl/Getty Images The system tracks physical locations just as efficiently as web traffic. Federal Trade Commission enforcement actions against data brokers like Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla revealed a rather robust market for precise geographical data harvested directly from cell phones. Commercial tools like Babel Street’s Locate X take these mobile advertising IDs and map them onto real-world coordinates. In one documented test, investigators used commercial advertising records to trace an individual device from a private residence in Alabama to a local hardware store, a church, and finally an abortion clinic in Florida. In modern-day America, you don’t need a warrant, a badge, or a court order to track someone across state lines. With an ad-tech subscription and a corporate login, you’re good to go. How to take back your privacyEvery American with a smartphone should care. The reason is straightforward. By default, they’re enrolled in a passive location-tracking network. Apps like MyFitnessPal, Tinder, and run-of-the-mill mobile games collect spatial coordinates and transmit them into open ad auctions billions of times every day. That data is aggregated and packaged, then sold to third parties who build permanent location profiles on millions of citizens. Your phone tracks each visit to a counselor, a house of worship, a divorce lawyer, or a hospital, turning your daily routines and commutes into an open book for commercial entities. Stopping the insanity requires cutting off the flow at its source. On iPhone, open Settings, go to Privacy & Security, select Tracking, and toggle off Allow Apps to Request to Track. Then go to Apple Advertising at the bottom of the Privacy menu and disable Personalized Ads. On Android, open Settings, select Privacy, tap Ads, and choose Delete advertising ID. Deleting this ID wipes your existing profile tag and forces apps to stop sharing your location with advertising brokers. The steps are simple, but the principle is even simpler. If the Pentagon doesn’t trust strangers to know where its people are, you probably shouldn’t want strangers knowing where you are either.