Okay, good point.

On Apple iPhones, you have to give permission to apps to track you in the background. I am not familiar with Android, but I expect they also provide that ability. I guess the difference is iPhones can only get apps from Apple's App store which has rigorous testing before an app can be listed on the app store. It isn't perfect, but they try.

If I understand Android phones correctly you can download any app from anywhere you want, which opens it up to more "malware".

On Android, you open your settings, then go to apps. Scroll down to the apps that are giving you headaches. Press them. Under permissions, toggle OFF the permission for "location."

The app might or might not work properly if you do that, but you can always toggle it back on when you want to actually use the app.

Well, a couple of points. You are being tracked. PERIOD. I guarantee if you purchase something (almost anything) online you will start seeing ads on websites advertising those items. There are NO settings that will prevent that.

Where you get emails from is more complex, and you can certainly set settings to cut down on letting your email address out, but there are places online that in order to do business (like our vet office, bank, Facebook, Twitter, etc) that require you to give them your email address. Those businesses can/do sell your email address. Many give you the option to not sell or distribute it, but not all.

And even if the site you are doing business with promises to not distribute your email address - sites are hacked daily - every single day, and sometimes very large numbers of accounts are compromised. That results in YOUR email address being circulated on the "dark web" and being sold to people, who then validate that your address is valid and active and in turn then sell it at a premium to advertising companies.

And I see you qualified your statement with "local" businesses. A lot of so-called "local" businesses are not local. And second, companies advertise on the internet. Almost NONE of them do it themselves. They simply provide ad content to an advertising company and pay some amount per "hit". A hit being someone responds, either by clicking an email, or visiting a targeted IP address, or many other ways.

I expect your email service provider is doing some amount of spam blocking for you.

One of the things I see here is a misunderstanding of spam and how it works. There is very little spam resulting from apps running on your phone or computer.

Spam is a result of your email address being circulated among people and companies on the internet that make money by buying and selling your email address. It only has to be leaked ONCE to get into the system and it takes years to fall out. The only sure way to completely stop emails coming to a specific email address is to close that email account. I research Gmail a while back (Gmail is one of the largest email providers) and found I did not like the information they (Google) were collecting from my emails. So, I changed to iCloud. I canceled my Gmail account and went through months of updating websites and companies with my new email address.

Since then there has been a slowly increasing rate of spam on my new iCloud account. ICloud and Apple's mail client have excellent spam filtering and while I now get around 200 to 300 spams per day, I only ever see a very few (5 maybe?)

this post is correct- i tried a vpn only to have a good numbers of sites i visit no longer 'work.' is a good idea but needs more development

On android phones it is possible to turn off the GPS function, I keep mine off. Now as noted above this will interfere with some apps. I have Google play so limited that I get multiple warnings each day from Google. I have gone to each app, where necessary I have turned off access to the camera, photos, location, call data etc., this helped greatly.
Also, I made the mistake once of signing up for 'rewards' from a restaurant with my phone, I will never do that again. If a store wants me to sign up for rewards, it must be by my home computer where I have more control.
Hope this helps.

I read all of the posts, but I still don't understand the issue. I don't care if I am being tracked or if I get spam email. And, as far as I know, my Android phone has never stopped working because of malware or anything else. I get a telemarketing calls, but I love talking to those people.

Great thread. I just bought a home at TV but I still work and run an IT organization. We contemplate our employee mobile device experience quite a bit. There are a few things that if done, really can help here. 1. email: if you have a "free" email account (i.e. Gmail), everything you do with that "free" service is tracked and that data is sold. Some on this thread are okay with that and some are not. If you don't like it, try a paid, secure email service like Protonmail. 2. browser: the browser (Safari, Chrome, etc.) you use gives the developer a wealth of knowledge about what you do at all times and they make money off that. Did your son search for "restaurants near me" using his phone's browser or something like that while he was down there? Is he logged into his phone's browser with the same "free" email account? There are a number of secure browser options he can download and use like Brave and Firefox Focus that are really good. 3. search engine: most browsers use Google as the default search engine so when you search for "restaurants near me" Google is performing the search (and making money off that search). Doing it on Chrome, logged in with your Gmail account pretty much allows them to track everything you do on the phone. Try changing the default browser to Duck Duck Go. I play around with GPS settings but haven't been able to optimize it as map apps need it and I depend on that app. I've settled in on leaving it on and only letting Google Maps keep my trips for the shortest time before deleting. Hope this helps.

If that is what Facebook is really saying and doing, they need to be shutdown, completely.

Way too much was left out of the original post to know what is occurring! Is the spam in the form or texts, phone calls, emails, or some other communication, like Messenger?

The other important things are, is the cellphone number used for business, which you recently answered, yes. The other important thing to know is Android or Apple. The other important thing to know is which cellular carrier?

If the cellphone was not used for business, and the cellphone is an iPhone, then the solution is pretty simple to significantly reduce the spam. Simply turn on “Silence Unknown Callers”. For the texts, you can silence the unknown texts too. If you have T-Mobile service, they offer additional screening.

Now, since the cellphone is used for business, then this limits your ability to screen out spam. One thing that could help is to not use the real cellphone number for the business. Instead, use Google Voice for the business.

Sign up for a free Google Voice line and install the Google Voice app on an iPhone. If the cellphone is an Android, it should be replaced with an iPhone. Next, port the business telephone number to Google Voice. Then replace the real cellphone number with a different real cellphone number.

Then lock down the real cellphone by turning on the filtering for the incoming telephone calls and texts. You will then have two telephone numbers with that cellphone. One is the real cellphone number, which is only used for people on your contact list. The other telephone number is the Google Voice line, that is only used for business calls.

Google Voice has some built in filtering. Each initial incoming telephone call needs to be “approved” by you. I think that the initial incoming texts also have to be approved by you.

If you don’t have T-Mobile service, and tge T-Mobile cellular coverage is good enough for you, then you could switch to T-Mobile for additional spam protection to the real cellphone number.

It’s a big mistake to use the real cellphone number for a business, since you are opening yourself up to getting a lot of spam, since you can’t lock down the real cellphone number.

Using a Google Voice number for the business and keeping your real cellphone number private, should drastically reduce the spam problems. Then in the future, keep your real cellphone number private. Give out your Google Voice number to “random” people. You can also start locking down apps on the iPhone to limit or stop the tracking activity.

When I visit Mexico for vacation, all the ads I see later on are in Spanish.

When I chat about cruises on my phone, suddenly I get a lot of ad and e-mail(s) related to cruises.

Yes, we are being watched. Yes, eventually, they learn something new about us and will promote that instead of the old "outdated" data they have about us.

I get the same thing all the time. Block n delete, Rather than getting a headache over it. Simple. No matter what this is the technology generation. If you dont want unwanted ads etc, the use your phone as a PHONE and quit researching things

My thanks to everyone who took the time to help with y son's problem. I will pass everything along to him and let him take it from here.

Tracking cookies in their browser are the likely reason for the ads. Google is one of the worst about tracking to develop ads relevant to searches done on Google. All major players do this. There are privacy setting it each online account to assist with privacy. Have them delete their cookies and browsing history on the phones web browser. Yes there are VPNs for cellular devices. I use IP Vanish. It works on all platforms. Once an account is set up, you can use their VPN on every device you own.

It's similar to when we google Men's diapers , we will be inundated with advertisement for senior living assisted devices.... it's all about tracking & location services