If you have a Xiaomi smartphone, today I’ll explain how to block advertising tracking and prevent your Xiaomi smartphone from knowing too much about you. Since its inception, Xiaomi has used its MIUI as a means of making money with a rather particular business model. As I explained to you in this editorial, the software has always counted more for Xiaomi than hardware, especially in the mother country.
Having started out as an “internet company”, Xiaomi has devised various methods to keep the costs of its physical products low, whether they are smartphones, headphones or more. The most obvious (and also annoying for users) method is to insert the advertising inside the MIUI. Precisely for this reason, I have decided to make you understand how to block advertising tracking on your Xiaomi, Redmi or POCO smartphone.
Here is the procedure to follow:
- Go to Settings/Password and security
- Scroll down and click on Privacy
- Scroll down and click on Advertising services
- Deactivate the toggle Personalized advertising recommendations
In the latter menu, if you click on Information on privacy and advertising services Xiaomi specifies that the advertisements that appear in the MIUI are not created by Xiaomi. Here is what is specified:
How does Xiaomi use your data?
In order to protect your privacy, we use Google Advertising ID to improve the relevance of the ads that are shown to you. The goal of Google’s Advertising ID is to help us group people based on their interests. In other words, we use this tool to define the target audience for specific types of ads you will receive.
As a result, all the advertisements you see on your Xiaomi smartphone depend on your Google Advertising ID account (aka GAID). Here, then, is how to proceed to disable the personalization of advertising by Google:
- Go to Settings/Google
- Click on Ads
- Enable the toggle Disable Ads Personalization
By doing so, the system will prevent apps from using the Google Advertising ID to show advertisements. However, this does not mean that the advertisements will disappear: if you want to remove them, there is a dedicated guide.