How to Keep Your Personal Data Safe From Targeted IRL Ads
Personalized ads aren’t just on your screens anymore. Over the past few years, advertisers have experimented with ways to use all the data they have about you on billboards and other IRL advertisements. Think how creepy it is when Facebook knows too much about you . Now imagine how you would feel if a giant flat screen in a shopping mall showed you the same information in the form of giant text that other people probably aren’t looking at, but could definitely read if it caught their attention. …
You want to go back to bed and hide under the covers, right?
In the real world, targeted ads combine basic physical information about you at the moment – your height, what you wear, your facial expressions – with a large amount of personal data transmitted through your phone. As it turns out, iOS and Android phones have a Mobile Advertising ID that collects all ad-related data on your phone for distribution. (Think of it as a universal web cookie tracker, but everything you do on your phone is connected to the Internet).
In fact, ad companies have already used these identifiers to turn web tracking into real-life tracking. According to a Medium report, this involves using cameras and ID numbers to see if people viewing ads for a nearby store are actually going there, and perhaps looking to see if that led to a sale.
Regardless of which phone you have, there are a few things you can do to minimize the amount of data sent to the world and to IRL ads through your Mobile Advertising ID. Both iOS and Android allow you to opt out of sending your ID to third parties, and both give you the option to reset your ID number. For reasons that I will explain at the end of this article, I suggest you do both.
Think you would prefer to minimize the amount of data transferred wherever you go? Do not worry. We’ll also cover the reset process.
IOS, macOS and Apple TV
On iOS devices, opt-out of ad data is a two-step process. For the first part, you really need to choose “limit ad tracking” and not opt out of tracking your data. (A clever language trick to make Apple seem like a good guy.) In the settings app on your phone, select Privacy, then Ads and turn on Restrict ad tracking. According to Apple Support , you can also reset your advertising ID by turning on limiting ad tracking and then turning it off again.
For the second part, which is a bit tricky to find, you need to turn off location data transmission for ads. As in the first step, go to the System Preferences app and click on Privacy. From there, select “location services”, then “system services” and finally turn off “Apple location-based advertising.” Obviously, if you have all location-based services disabled, you are already set up, but this is also a good compromise.
If you want to be more thorough, you should also limit ad tracking on your other Apple devices. Your advertising ID is associated with your Apple ID, so it also connects to other Apple devices, including Mac laptops and desktops, and Apple TVs. While you may not be pinging billboards with your iMac, it is never a bad idea to block the path that leads advertisers to your data.
Fortunately, the process is similar on these devices: on macOS, open the System Preferences app and go to the privacy menu. From there, scroll down, click on “Ads” and check the box next to “Restrict ad tracking.” On Apple TV, open the Settings app and select General, then Privacy. In the privacy menu, turn on “Restrict ad tracking.”
On Android
Go to the Google Settings app and click on Ads. Check the box at the top of the menu labeled “Opt out of interest-based advertising” that serves as a “do not track” prompt for your mobile ID. It also disables personalized ads in Google apps on your phone. You can also reset your Mobile Advertising ID from the Ads menu by clicking, you guessed it, “Reset Advertising ID”.
Regardless of what devices you use, I recommend that you turn off ad tracking and then reset your ID to get the most out of these features. As Medium points out, Google’s wording about “opt out of interest-based advertising” leaves room for the possibility that businesses may still ask for your ID even if you check the box. Apple points out that it removes your ID when you restrict tracking and sends a non-unique ID if someone asks for it, which is definitely better, but given that your Apple ID is spread across many devices, it’s probably wiser to go wrong on the side caution and reset your ID after you enable the setting on all your devices without exception.