How to remove mobile advertising id from Android phone
Introduction
MAID, or Mobile Advertising ID, is a piece of text that uniquely identifies your phone. Your phone includes this id in all online requests that you make. From Wikipedia:
(MAID) can be sent to advertisers and other third parties which can use this unique ID to track the user's movements, habits, and usages of applications.
It is essentially a way of spying on all your online activities. Cookies, a similar technology, can be disabled by modifying your browser's settings. But that change does not affect MAIDs.
Why would you want to disable MAIDs ?
Advertising and predicitive analysis companies like Google, IBM, Oracle, Resonate Networks and many others will tell you that MAIDs are anonymous. And at its core that statement is true, MAIDs are randomly generated and they do not contain any information related to you, the user. However the way MAIDs are used is not anonymous at all.
Consider this scenario, you are shopping online at Home Depot. You created your account and provided Home Depot with your name, your address, your phone number and your email address. Let's say that Home Depot has an account with Google and they share information. As part of that agreement Home Depot sends your browsing and shopping history to Google. Home Depot can send to Google all your information in an anonymized form, or not. That decision is no longer yours. Google aggregates browsing data from many clients. Those clients can be retailers or they can be online news vendors, which can send to Google a history of all online articles you have read. If you do most of your online shopping and reading using your mobile phone then all these pieces of information are linked because they share the same MAID. Advertising aggregators like Google can go even further. If they can obtain your name and phone number they can order your credit score report, a list of transactions from your credit card provider or your entire browsing history from your Internet Service Provider. All that information is combined and further analyzed using deep learning algorithms. What comes out is a very comprehensive profile that can describe not only your shopping preferences but also your political views, your sexual orientation or your family situation. How much or how little of that data companies like Google share with their clients is basically a question of price. Your privacy, as such, no longer matters.
In 2018 Google started working on project Dragonfly, a search engine that was to be deployed in China and that would allow the Chinese government to link search queries performed by users to their phone numbers and to censor the web sites they could visit. Dragonfly project was abandoned because Google's employees objected to building such software. Google's leadership apparently had no qualms about creating software that would limit freedoms of Chinese citizens.
The Internet was designed as a highly distributed system, with many computers talking to each other. Companies like Google and others make it more centralized, with all information aggregated in one place. If history has taught us anything it is that too much power (and information is power) concetrated in one individual's, or in one organization's, hands has rarely been a good idea. It might be worth mentioning that companies like NBC, their parent Comcast and other news providers also use MAIDs and other ids to track the shows you are watching. Their online streaming services are expanding and they all can get a hold of your mobile device's advertising id.
How to disable MAIDs on Android phones
Go to Settings, click on Google. If there are two tabs, Recommended and All services, click on All services. Click on Ads, then click on Delete advertising ID. If you cannot find these menus on your phone try Settings, then Privacy, then Ads. Click on Delete advertising ID.
How to disable advertising IDs on Apple phones
Apple calls MAIDs Identifiers for Advertisers (IDFAs). Open Settings, go to Privacy and Security, or just Privacy. If you cannot find that menu swipe left to access the App Library. Click on Apple Advertising, then toggle Personalized Ads to off position.