Oopsie
Strava, the fitness tracker app that calls itself the social network for athletes, has come under fire after publishing their Global Heat Map. The online resource shows where its almost 30 million users across the planet exercise, revealing well-trodden (and cycled, and swam, and skied) routes the users take. However, all that publicly viewable data is also revealing the location and layout of military bases - some that are supposed to be secret.
This was first noticed by Australian Nathan Ruser who studies international security. He noticed that the data collected from US soldiers in a base in Syria not only highlighted exactly where the base is, but also the internal layout. Christ.
Strava released their global heatmap. 13 trillion GPS points from their users (turning off data sharing is an option). https://t.co/hA6jcxfBQI … It looks very pretty, but not amazing for Op-Sec. US Bases are clearly identifiable and mappable pic.twitter.com/rBgGnOzasq— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) January 27, 2018
The option to share your workout data can be turned off in the app, solving this problem. But right now if you were wanting to plan an attack on a military base, and know exactly where the soldiers run, jog, and generally patrol, you can. Yay. Needless to say there are probably going to be some big changes about how soldiers share data such as this online.