Ad Tracking Devices Are Reportedly Being Used To Target U.S. Forces In The Middle East. Troops Are Taking Measures.

U.S. forces are disabling ad trackers on phones and computers following reports that they were being used to target troops in the Middle East, according to a new report.

The Air Force told Senator Ron Wyden that it took such measures two months ago, while the U.S. Special Operations Command did so "recently." The senator had been pressing the Pentagon to address the issue over concerns that the data could be bought and used to track and target troops.

The Navy also told Wyden that the Department of the Navy "disables the Mobile Advertising Identifier (MAID) within itssecure application environment as a standard cybersecurity protocol for Government Furnished Equipment (GFE) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) configurations."

However, Wyden sent a letter to the Department of Defense's Inspector General, Plate B. Morning III, requesting more information on the matter. It was also signed by Rep. Pat Harrigan.

They said that the "U.S. Central Command recently confirmed that foreign adversaries have used commercial location data to target U.S. military personnel, an admission that Representative Harrigan, 12 other Members of Congress and I revealed in a May 2026 letter to the DoD Chief Information Officer."

Elsewhere in the letter, Wyden and Harrigan said that while forces confirmed the directive, "recent reports regarding the continued availability of commercial location data originating from DoD facilities raise troubling questions."

"One possibility is that certain DoD components have not, in fact,fully disabled the advertising IDs on government devices or only recently implemented these policies," reads a passage of the letter.

"Another possibility is that disabling the advertising ID is no longer a sufficient defense on its own, as data brokers can still capture, correlate, and monetize unique location data using other information collected from phones. A third—and particularly alarming—possibility is that the commercial data currently available for sale originates entirely from personal devices brought into DoD facilities and operational areas by servicemembers and government contractors," the lawmakers added.

As a result, they requested that the office "examine location datasets already purchased by DoD and other federal agencies and use them to query DoD facilities and military bases and identify where DoD policies have not prevented the sale of location data."

"In particular, we request that you determine whether commercially available data is originating from personal phones. If personal devices are identified as the primary source of this data, your office should recommend concrete policy changes to eliminate this vulnerability, enforce technical controls on personal devices in sensitive areas, and safeguard DoD personnel and OPSEC from commercial surveillance," it concludes.