How to Stop Phone Tracking Without Breaking the Useful Parts
Open your phone’s privacy settings. Go ahead — I’ll wait.
That little pile of toggles is the whole subject of this post, and most people have never scrolled through it. Here’s the reassuring frame before we start: your phone tracks more than you’d guess, but almost none of it is a spy movie. It’s advertising. Apps note where you go and what you tap, an ID ties it together, and that information gets bought and sold in a data-broker economy the FTC has been steadily cracking down on. The goal of this checkup isn’t to vanish. It’s to switch off the phone tracking that only feeds advertisers while keeping the location that makes Maps, weather, and finding a lost phone actually work.
Give it fifteen minutes. You can do the whole thing from your couch.
Quick summary: Three settings do most of the work: your phone’s advertising ID, cross-app tracking, and per-app location permissions. Turn the first two off entirely, trim the third app by app, and you’ve cut the bulk of the tracking without losing the features you rely on. Paths for both iPhone and Android are below.
What your phone is actually tracking
Three things, mostly.
The first is location — where you are, gathered by apps you’ve given permission to. Some of that is genuinely useful (your map needs to know where you are). A lot of it isn’t, like a flashlight app that wants your whereabouts around the clock.
The second is an advertising ID — a unique tag your phone hands to apps and advertisers so they can recognize you across different apps and build a profile. Think of it as a name tag your phone wears into every store, so the shops can compare notes on you. You can’t see it, but it’s doing quiet work.
The third is app permissions generally — the running list of what each app is allowed to reach: location, contacts, microphone, photos. Apps ask once, you tap “allow” without much thought, and it sticks for years.
None of this is illegal, and none of it means someone is watching you personally. It’s a machine, not a stalker. But you’re allowed to turn the machine down, and the switches are easier to reach than you’d think.
The 15-minute checkup
Do these in order. Where the steps differ by phone, I’ve split them.
Step 1 — Reset the advertising ID (the highest-value two minutes)
This is the single move most guides bury, and it’s the one I’d do first. Cutting off the advertising ID breaks the thread that ties your activity together.
On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, and turn off “Allow Apps to Request to Track.” With that off, apps can’t ask to follow you across other apps, and they lose access to your phone’s ad identifier entirely. (Apple’s own explainer confirms this is what the switch does.)
On Android: Settings → Privacy → Ads, then tap Delete advertising ID. Once deleted, any app that asks for it just gets a string of zeros. (Reset is the softer option if you’d rather not delete it outright.)
Step 2 — Turn off personalized ads from the phone maker
Apple and Google each run their own ad-targeting on top of everything else. Switch it off.
On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising, and turn off Personalized Ads.
On Android: in that same Settings → Privacy → Ads menu, turn on Opt out of Ads Personalization (wording varies slightly by phone — on newer Android versions the same controls live under Ads privacy).
You’ll still see ads. They’ll just be less tailored to a profile of you — which is the entire point.
Step 3 — Prune location, app by app
This is where you keep the useful and cut the rest.
On iPhone: Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services. Leave the master switch on (you want Maps to work), then scroll the app list. For each one, ask “does this need my location?” Set most to While Using the App, and switch off Precise Location for apps that only need your rough area — a weather app doesn’t need your exact street.
On Android: Settings → Location → App location permissions. Same idea: set apps to “Allow only while using,” and turn off precise location where it isn’t needed.
The rule of thumb: a map, a weather app, and your phone’s find-my-device feature can keep location. A game, a flashlight, and most shopping apps don’t need it.
You’re done when you’ve reset or deleted your ad ID, turned off both personalized-ad settings, and walked the full location list once. That’s it — the changes hold until you install something new, so a quick re-run every few months keeps it tidy.
What I’d leave on
A checkup that tells you to turn off everything is doing you a disservice, because some of this genuinely helps you.
What I’d do: Keep location on for Maps, weather, and Find My iPhone / Find My Device — the last one has rescued more lost phones than any tracking setting has ever hurt me. Reset the ad ID and forget the rest.
What I’d skip: The paranoid extremes — killing all location, deleting every permission, installing five privacy apps to police the others. That’s a lot of daily friction to dodge ad targeting, and it tends to break things you actually use.
If you want to go a step further on the data side, it’s worth understanding where all this information ends up when it leaves your phone — which is the same trail I followed in what happens to your data when a company gets hacked. And for a related “who can actually see me” question, what hotel and public WiFi networks can and can’t see covers the other half.
Close the settings app
You opened your privacy settings at the top of this. You can close them now — the work holds on its own, quietly, in the background where the tracking used to be.
Set a reminder to run through it again around the change of seasons. Fifteen minutes, twice a year, is a fair trade for staying the one who decides what your phone shares.
Verified resources & documentation
- Apple Support — If an app asks to track your activity (App Tracking Transparency)
- Google Play Help — Advertising ID (reset and delete)
- FTC — Mobile location analytics (consumer advice)
- FTC — Protecting consumers’ location data: key takeaways from four recent cases
Keep reading
- What Happens to Your Data When a Company Gets Hacked
- Public WiFi and the Apple Ecosystem: What Hotel Networks Can and Cannot See
- Password Managers Explained: What They Are and Why You Actually Need One
This is general information, not personal security advice. Your situation may differ — verify with a professional for high-stakes decisions.