US Military disables ad trackers on troops' phones

tencentshill

It sounds like they disabled the "advertising ID" OS feature, but there are many other ways to fingerprint a device for advertising. Maybe this will lead to real privacy reform, now that the true risks are apparent. Not to mention ICE using the same data against civilians.

Havoc

Could also you know just ban invasive tracking and adtech bullshit…

quickthrowman

Could probably get a lot of actionable military information about troop locations by running targeted ads for subprime auto loans and divorce lawyers and collecting location information, discarding any US locations.

slowmovintarget

This is just happening now? Shouldn't this have been done for troop security a long time ago?

exabrial

Wow, it's like there should be a law that allows anyone to disable all data tracking about then, not just anonymize it. This is a large conversation about Consent, which is a concept Silicon Valley refuses to acknowledge.

shevy-java

Google hates this trick.

JohnTHaller

Hopefully they aren't forcing the military to install Trump's spyware White House app

iamnothere

Wait until they realize that military spouses and children might also need this, and government employees, and sensitive contractors, etc. It’s almost as if “ad trackers” shouldn’t exist at all. The US government used to love this stuff when it was the only one who could abuse it. There might be a different outlook now that the tables have turned.

nonameiguess

These things need to include more details. What is the report that ads were used to target deployed troops? What is the device use policy as of today? FOBs and semi-permanent installations are not secret locations. They're extremely obvious, have marked fences, gates, and guards in uniform. They're on satellite and aerial photos, sometimes on maps, depending on how long they've been in place. During patrols and any other movements in which unit locations are meant to be secret, as of 15 years ago when I was still serving, phones or any other kind of personal electronic device were not allowed. Even in training exercises, as far back as 2009 that I experienced, and probably further back than that, SIGINT units used radio triangulation to find and kill you when you used a phone during an exercise, which resulted in both removal from the exercise and reprimand because you weren't supposed to have a phone with you in the first place. They also captured and publicly shamed shit like getting nudes from your girlfriend or even just exchanging text messages. If deployed personnel are sharing videos of their deployment activities to social media, how is that allowed? It can't be, right? They're violating some policy in doing that. Unit commanders have your social media accounts and monitor what you do there. Uniformed servicemembers have never had any expectation of privacy. UCMJ doesn't have 4th amendment rights. Your room, housing, belongings, car, phone, can all be searched with impunity at any time, with or without notice. All communications can and will be intercepted and read.

9cb14c1ec0

Just throwing this link out into the void: https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad... Wonder why it took the Pentagon so long to take the ads risk seriously.

ferguess_k

Does it make sense to give the troops special phones instead of their own? I always find it weird that soldiers can take their own phones into the base.

cgannett

Oh boy, what an easy way to see if the phone's user is military or not.

1vuio0pswjnm7

theguardian.com now requires a user-agent header Any string is acceptable, including zero characters

silver92bullet

This is probably a smart move. Especially finger printing is more and more intelligent. If foreign actors are using exercise tracking apps to track US Military personnel and positions. It seems reasonable that they would want to block something that is much lower effort for tracking.

mmooss

If they can do it effectively, that would be impressive. There are so many ways phones and other devices are tracked. Do they prevent users from installing apps? For example, I was reading Apple's Platform Security guide, a technical, detailed manual: There are so many identifiers, before any applications are installed - really, before the OS is fully loaded - that it's hard to keep track of them, manage them, or even form a mental picture of what's going on. Apple in many ways requires you to send those identifiers to them in order to use the device. Apple is trying to protect consumers by operating the Root of Trust for the consumer devices, something consumers can't do effectively for themselves. And maybe Apple provides large customers with means to become their own root of trust; some of Apple's keys are embedded during manufacturing but other vendors allow large customers to substitute their own keys at that stage. Regardless, it makes Apple an incredibly valuable target for highly resourced attackers, like the kind targeting the US military: Gain the right authority at Apple and you can monitor and control Apple devices worldwide. I'm not sure how the US military protects themselves without highly managed, locked down, customized devices.

sorenKaram

Feels like this should have been done long ago. Like I would just assume that ad tracking (any kind of tracking) for military is always gonna be a bad idea.

stevenalowe

Why do deployed troops have cell phones at all? Seems like a huge security risk

aleph_minus_one

Why even allow any mobile phone for the US solider if it could cause any arbitrary problem for the US military if the location data, name, unit, rank, ... of the respective soldier was published and permanently updated on a publicly viewable website? It should be obvious that the US military has good reasons why this would be the death for many military strategies. So, why doesn't the military than treat every soldier who has a mobile phone near to him where the above could cause military problems to be a saboteur (perhaps even with the accusation of being a spy of a hostile nation) who should be charged by a military tribunal?