It's time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."

"Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes," the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it ​was time to "start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat."

Looks like the U.S. government is catching up to the reality that every ad request is a massive breach of personal data.

The letter from U.S. lawmakers to ​the Pentagon said that, given what military officials know about the trade in location data, they should have ​acted faster to protect ⁠their personnel, for example by disabling the unique advertising ID attached to military-issued devices, automatically turning off location sharing on smartphones in the field, and steering staff away from Google's Chrome web browser toward more privacy-focused alternatives.

One of the letter's cosigners was U.S. Representative Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican who was formerly a U.S. ⁠Army Special ​Forces officer. Harrigan said that browsers like Chrome "are built from the ground up to collect ​and share user data" and that every day they remain on government-issued devices "is another day we are handing our adversaries a weapon against our own troops."