Surveillance tools designed to sell products are reportedly working against the very people they’re supposed to target — including American troops. According to Reuters, several branches of the US military have shut off advertising trackers on phones and computers after learning that adversaries may have used location data purchased from data brokers to target US forces in the Middle East.
Reuters based its report on a letter Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon sent to the Department of Defense’s Inspector General. The letter states that the Air Force switched off advertising identifiers on all its devices roughly two months ago. Special Operations Command recently did the same on its Windows machines, and the Army disabled tracking on mobile devices earlier this year.
Wyden Warns Pentagon About Location Data Risks
Wyden has pressed the Pentagon on this issue for months. Back in May, he told military leaders that commercial location data lets adversaries identify where US troops gather and how they move, information they can exploit to plan missile, drone, and roadside bomb attacks, or for counterintelligence purposes.
Those warnings echo earlier Reuters reporting from May, which indicated that adversaries had already used commercially available location information to target US personnel stationed in the Middle East.
Years of Reports Expose Military Tracking Risks
This isn’t a new problem — just one that’s finally prompting action. In 2024, Wired detailed how easily purchasable data could reveal the movements of US military contractors, in one case placing them at brothels in Germany. Three years earlier, in 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported that a defense contractor had managed to track US military operations simply by analyzing data generated by apps installed on soldiers’ phones.
Even further back, in 2018, The Guardian revealed that data from the fitness-tracking app Strava had exposed the locations of secret US Army bases. Nearly a decade later, the underlying vulnerability, smartphones quietly broadcasting sensitive location data, remains largely unresolved.
Videos and Apps Still Pose a Threat
Adversaries don’t always need to buy this information, either. A Reuters report from July found that videos filmed and posted online by American service members in the Middle East may have helped Iran pinpoint their locations. That finding reportedly led some deployed troops to be asked to hand over their phones altogether.
Disabling ad trackers closes one entry point, but as recent history shows, it’s only one piece of a much larger challenge in protecting military personnel from digital exposure.
