Disable Ad Tracking on Android (2026)

Android's ad tracking settings have moved, and the reason people were told to expect the advertising ID to disappear no longer holds. This is where the controls actually live in 2026, and what they do and do not accomplish.

Where the settings are now

Google relocated these under the Google services menu. The current path is:

Settings → Google → All services → Privacy & security → Ads

Inside Ads privacy you will find three separate controls, each of which does something different:

• Ad topics — interest categories your device infers and shares with apps and sites.
• App suggested ads — lets apps you use suggest ads to other apps.
• Ad measurement — lets advertisers measure ad performance using data from your device.

Turn all three off. They are independent toggles; switching one off does not affect the others.

Delete the advertising ID

Separately from those toggles, the same Ads screen lets you delete the advertising ID outright. This matters more than the opt-out slider that older guides describe. When the ID is deleted, apps requesting it receive a string of zeros rather than a persistent identifier.

That is a meaningfully stronger outcome than "opting out of personalisation," which historically left the identifier intact and merely asked advertisers to behave.

What changed, and why the old advice was wrong

Guidance written around 2021 and 2022, including an earlier version of this post, said Android would stop issuing an advertising ID and that apps would invent their own identifiers to fill the gap. That was a reasonable reading of Google's Privacy Sandbox on Android announcement at the time. It did not happen.

On 17 October 2025 Google announced it was retiring most Privacy Sandbox technologies, including Topics, the Attribution Reporting API, Protected Audience, Protected App Signals, the SDK Runtime, and On-Device Personalization, across both Chrome and Android. The replacement architecture that was supposed to make the advertising ID unnecessary has been withdrawn.

The practical consequence: the Android advertising ID is not being removed. It remains the identifier the ad ecosystem is built on, which makes deleting it a durable control rather than a temporary one.

The part that constrains apps

Google Play policy requires apps to use the advertising ID for advertising purposes when one is available. Using other persistent identifiers for ad targeting is a policy violation and can get an app removed from Play. Developers may use the App Set ID for analytics and fraud prevention, but not for advertising.

This is worth knowing because it undercuts the fatalistic version of this advice. Apps substituting their own ad identifiers is against the rules, not the expected default. It still happens, and enforcement is imperfect, but the incentive structure is not what the 2022 framing assumed.

What this does not fix

Deleting the advertising ID removes one durable, resettable identifier. It does not address:

• Fingerprinting. Device model, screen dimensions, locale, installed fonts, sensor characteristics and network attributes still combine into a reasonably stable signature.
• Server-side identity resolution. An email address or phone number handed to an app at signup is a stronger and more permanent identifier than the ad ID ever was.
• Account-level linkage. Signing into a Google account ties activity together regardless of what the device advertises.
• Network-level observation. Your carrier and any on-path observer see traffic patterns the ad ID has nothing to do with.

Treat this as removing one clean join key from the aggregation problem. It is worth doing, it takes two minutes, and it is not a substitute for compartmentalisation or a hardened device.

Sources

• Manage your ad privacy settings on Android — Google Android Help
• Advertising ID — Google Play Console Help
• Update on Plans for Privacy Sandbox Technologies — Google, 17 October 2025

Verified against the sources above in August 2026. Android settings paths vary slightly by manufacturer skin and OS version.