Letters: US military branches disabled ad trackers on government-issued devices amid reports of location data being used to target US forces in the Middle East (Raphael Satter/Reuters)
ThinkingNews Desk · how this was written
The U.S. Department of Defense has disabled advertising-tracking IDs on all government-issued iPhones, Android phones and Windows computers used by the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Special Operations Command. The move follows reports that location data from those trackers was being used to target U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Written from all 3 reports below, not from any single one.
How it was reported
- TechMeme·Letters: US military branches disabled ad trackers on government-issued devices amid reports of location data being used to target US forces in the Middle East (Raphael Satter/Reuters)
The U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard stripped advertising trackers from all government-issued devices after discovering that location data from those trackers was being used to target U.S. forces in the Middle East. OpenAI launched GPT-6 “Astra,” trained on a run using over 100,000 GPUs, scoring 62.7% on ARC-AGI-3 with its standard harness (99.9% with a provider-adapter harness) and costing $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.
- TechCrunch·US military disabled ad tracking on troops’ devices following reports of targeted attacks
The Department of Defense has turned off advertising-tracking IDs on all government-issued iPhones, Android phones and Windows computers used by the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and Special Operations Command to stop adversaries from exploiting location data. The change, rolled out earlier this year and most recently by the Air Force in July, aims to prevent hostile governments and data brokers from identifying and targeting service members and bases with commercially sourced location information.
- Hacker News·US Military disables ad trackers on troops' phones
The Air Force disabled advertising identifiers on its computers and mobile phones two months ago. The Army has blocked them on Windows devices since before 2021 and on Android and Apple phones by at least February 2026. Special Operations Command and the Navy have recently disabled these IDs on their Windows devices. Lawmakers say location data can still be harvested from mobile advertising IDs via apps and network triangulation.
Related stories
- LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices3 outlets
- Apple says iPhone and iPad on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have become the first consumer devices NATO approved for use up to the "restricted" level of classified data (Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET)4 outlets
- Source: the DOD appears to have accepted OpenAI's safety red lines, which were similar to Anthropic's, to deploy OpenAI's tech in classified settings (Maria Curi/Axios)4 outlets
- OpenAI’s “compromise” with the Pentagon is what Anthropic feared4 outlets