Your Mobile Advertising ID (MAID) is the key to deleting your location history.
You are being tracked.
Advertisers and data brokers use your phone’s MAID to connect your location history to everything else they know about you. This hidden identifier allows them to build detailed profiles—tracking where you go, what you do, and even predicting your behavior.
What Is a MAID?
A Mobile Advertising ID (MAID) is a unique identifier built into your device. It’s designed for advertising, but in practice, it’s also used by:
Advertisers
Data brokers
Analytics companies
They use it to follow your mobile activity and tie it directly to your location data.
How Apps Leak MAIDs
Many common apps share your MAID and location data without you realizing it. This includes apps like:
Weather apps
Maps and navigation tools
Games
Camera apps
Social media platforms
Each one can leak your MAID, which then gets connected to your location history and personal details.
How Browsers Leak MAIDs
It’s not just apps. Your web browser can leak your MAID too.
Ads delivered in your browser—especially on Chrome—leak your MAID and location.
The real-time bidding process in online advertising exposes this data to countless advertisers and brokers.
This means your movements are being tracked and sold, often without your knowledge or consent.
What You Can Do
Whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android device, it’s important to know how to find and manage your MAID. Resetting or limiting its use reduces how much of your data can be tracked and resold.
And beyond managing your device settings, you can take broader action to delete the location history data brokers already hold about you.
Protect Your Location Privacy with ObscureIQ™
At ObscureIQ™, we specialize in helping you remove your digital footprint—including location data collected and stored by data brokers.
Our Footprint Wipe service is the only solution designed to purge your location history from hundreds of data brokers, cutting off years of invasive tracking about every place you and your phone have been.
📞 Contact ObscureIQ™ today to learn how we can help you take back control of your location privacy.
Experts Discuss Data Privacy
David Mauro interviews Merry Marwig, a data privacy advocate, and Jeff Jockisch, founder of ObscureIQ, about how data brokers work and how to delete your data by discussing the intersection of privacy and personal data.
