Disable Your Mobile Ad ID

We use our smartphones for everything and advertisers know this. You should disable mobile ad ID tracking … I’ll tell you how.

Evil MAID Problem

Your mobile device has several unique identifiers, either tied to your hardware, your cellular account, or your operating system (Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android). Advertisers and app makers (who may also be advertising companies, like Google, Facebook or Twitter/X) love these mobile advertising IDs (or MAIDs) because they can be used to track you mercilessly, correlating your web surfing and purchases across … well, everything you do.

Think of this like a license plate for your phone – a unique number that is always associated with your device, and therefore with you. If everything you did on your phone was associated with this single ID, advertisers could use this ID to track everything you do. The hope was that these IDs would be a pseudonym for the user, but in reality it was trivial to associate these IDs with your real identity. (We learned all about the dangers of this rampant tracking in my recent interview with Zach Edwards, which is well worth a listen.)

In the early days of smartphones, your phone could often be identified using permanent (unalterable) hardware identifiers: UDID on iOS or IMEI on Android. In order to provide some level of control over your privacy, Apple and Google then implemented IDs with more user control: Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) on iOS or Google Advertising ID (GAID) on Android. The key difference with these IDs is that Apple and Google allowed you to at least change (“reset”) these IDs manually, which would theoretically make it harder to track you. But in reality, this wasn’t really effective.

Breaking the Chain

Thankfully, Apple and Google have since provided ways to disable these IDs entirely. In 2021 with iOS 14.5, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT), which required that each app request permission to track you using your MAID, using a pop-up message whose wording was controlled by Apple – avoiding the usual dark patterns problem. And low and behold most people, when given a clear and unambiguous choice, said NO. Facebook said this single change cost them 13 billion dollars in 2022. If you disable your iOS ad ID, it sets your ID to all zeroes.

Google implemented some privacy protections it called Android Privacy Sandbox which purports to hide your MAID while still allowing targeted ads. But as of Android 12, you can also now delete your ad ID – as with iOS, this sets your ID to all zeroes.

Disabling Mobile Ad IDs

I’m not going to bother repeating what the EFF has already done (and will probably keep up to date), so let me just link to these wonderful guides that are part of the fantastic Surveillance Self Defense guides:

• EFF: Disable Android ad ID
• EFF: Disable iOS ad ID

There are a bunch of other great tips in these guides from EFF. I encourage you to look at the rest of these articles at the very least. But if you get ambitious, have a look at their other Surveillance Self Defense guides.

Realize that apps and advertisers have come up with other tricky ways to track you, like fingerprinting your mobile device. Apple has gone to great lengths to prevent this – both with policies for app developers and also with technical countermeasures – but it can be difficult to prevent entirely. At the end of the day, we need regulations that just forbid this tracking – or at least give us an easy way to turn it off.