Opting Out of Google Ads Is Not De-Googling
Resetting your advertising ID is a two-tap fix with a narrow blast radius. Worth doing, and worth being honest about: Google is still stitched into everything else on the phone.
Topic
How-To Guide
A collection of 33 issues
Disable Ad Tracking on Android (2026)
Android's ad tracking controls have moved, and the advertising ID is no longer going away. Where the settings are in 2026, what deleting the ad ID actually does, and what it does not fix.
Disable Ad Tracking (Apple)
Apple sells advertising too, and by default it builds the profile used to aim it out of your own device. Switching that off is a small job, done in four separate places rather than one.
WebRTC - Embedded Content Tracking
You can be paying for a VPN and still hand a website your real IP address, because the browser feature that powers video calls asks for it directly. Test yourself first, then decide what runs in which browser.
Remove Stored Wi-Fi (Android)
Your phone calls out for every network it has ever joined, by name, all day, to anyone listening nearby. The fix is tedious rather than difficult: forget them one at a time.
Safety Check and Access Audit (Apple)
Access accumulates quietly: a shared album, a partner's old device, an app you approved once and forgot. Apple built a wizard that lists all of it in one place, and one button that revokes the lot.
Remove Stored Wi-Fi (Apple)
The networks your iPhone remembers are a travel history — hotels, offices, airports, a friend's apartment — and it announces them. Clearing the list looks more alarming than it is.
Prevent Apps from Accessing Your Camera & Microphone on Android
No app needs your microphone as badly as it claimed at install time. The record of what you granted and what you refused is already sitting on the phone — the work is reading it honestly.
6 Easy Cyber Security Steps
The attacks that actually reach ordinary people are not clever. They are a password reused on a site that got breached, and a text message someone else received. Six habits that close the common paths.
Disable Siri on iPhone
Two minutes in Settings. Switching Siri off is the easy part; the recordings Apple is already holding need a separate request before they go anywhere.