The privacy setting most phones bury three menus deep, and it's worth the search

Every major phone OS ships a setting limiting how much ad networks can link your activity across different apps, and it's buried deep enough in settings that most users never find it, despite taking under two minutes to change once located.

The setting doesn't reduce how many ads you see. It reduces cross-app tracking — the reason a product you searched in one app starts appearing as an ad in a completely unrelated one days later. That correlation, not the ad itself, is the actual product being built about you.

I check this setting on every device I set up for family now. It's the highest-value two minutes available in any phone's settings menu, and almost nobody has touched it since the day they bought the phone.

Related reading: The Practical Guide to Using AI Tools Without Getting Burned and The hidden cost of free AI tools nobody talks about.