Android works to keep you safe and protect your privacy when you use apps. New features help protect your identity and give you more control over how advertisers choose which ads to show you. You can manage your new ad privacy experiences in your Android settings.
Android notes topics of interest based on apps you use. Apps can also store info with Android about your interests. An app you use later can ask for your ad topics or ads suggested by apps you’ve used previously to show you more relevant ads. To measure the performance of ads, limited types of data can be shared among apps and sites.
You can opt out of these features in your privacy settings anytime. In your apps, an ad you see may be personalized depending on these settings, your advertising ID settings, and the policies of the apps that you use.
Turn Ad privacy features on or off
Important: You can turn this feature on or off anytime. Here’s how you navigate to your ad privacy settings.
- On your Android phone, open Settings
.
- Tap Security and privacy
More privacy settings
.
More privacy settings To personalize your ad experience, Android notes your topics of interests based on the apps you use on your device. Once Android assigns you a topic, other apps may ask Android to share your topics to deliver a more personalized ad experience. You can also remove topics you don’t want to share with apps.
Android will share up to 3 topics at a time with an app. When you remove a topic, Android won’t share that topic again but you may still get ads related to that topic.
To further protect your privacy, Android deletes your ad topics after 4 weeks. To remove a topic on Android:
- On your Android device, open Settings
- Tap Privacy and security
- Tap Ads
- Under “Ad topics,†select the topics you want to block.
- Tap OK.
Note: While this feature can be turned on, you may not see a list of topics until this feature is fully available and apps start using it.
To help deliver a more personalized ads experience, apps you use can recommend and then store ad suggestions about things you may like. You may see ads based on these suggestions as you continue to use other apps on your device.
If you don’t want an app to suggest ads for you, you can block the app. Once blocked, any associated ad suggestion data is deleted. Blocked apps will no longer store ad suggestions with Android, but you may still get ads related to those apps.
To further protect your privacy, Android deletes ad suggestion data regularly. To block apps from suggesting ads:
- On your Android device, open Settings
- Tap Privacy and security
- Tap Ads
- Choose the ads you want to block.
Note: While this feature can be turned on, you may not see a list of topics until this feature is fully available and apps start using it.
Apps you use may share a limited amount of data to measure the performance of their ads, such as the time of day an ad was shown.
To turn ad measurement on or off:
- On your Android device, open Settings
- Tap Privacy and security
- Tap Ads
- Turn Allow ad measurement on or off.