Turn off advertising ID in Windows 11

If you want to stop apps on your PC from using the advertising ID, users can decide in Settings whether apps may use it when the policy is disabled or unconfigured. Set Turn off the advertising ID to Enabled to prevent that use.

Problems this can solve

You want to stop apps from using the advertising ID for personalized advertising.
You want a computer policy to set that choice instead of leaving it to each user.
You want to block the identifier without changing whether apps display advertisements.

Steps

Open the Local Group Policy Editor with gpedit.msc.
Navigate to Computer Configuration › Administrative Templates › System › User Profiles and open Turn off the advertising ID. Check the policy identity against the policy page before changing it.
Set the policy to Enabled and save the change.
Reopen the policy and confirm that its state is Enabled.

Understand the restriction before checking the result

The policy state labels can be easy to misread: Enabled turns off the advertising ID. Disabled and Not Configured leave users able to decide in Settings whether apps may use it. An unconfigured policy does not always turn the identifier on; when the initial setup experience is skipped, it defaults to off.

Diagnostic-data personalization uses a separate policy in the user configuration branch; this policy is in the computer configuration branch. Changing the advertising ID policy does not control diagnostic-data use.

Use the registry route

The registry value page has copyable blocks.

Restore user choice

Select Not Configured and save the change to return the choice to users.

This guide uses the Windows 11 version 26H2 (OS build 26300) policy templates published on 2026-09-29.