Military personnel around the world have been publicly sharing their exercise routes online – including those inside or near military bases.<\/p>\n
Online fitness tracker Strava has published a “heatmap” showing the paths its users log as they run or cycle.<\/p>\n
It appears to show the structure of foreign military bases in countries including Syria and Afghanistan, as soldiers move around inside.<\/p>\n
The US military is examining the heatmap, a spokesman said.<\/p>\n
Air Force Colonel John Thomas, a spokesman for US Central Command, told the Washington Post that the US military was reviewing the implications.<\/p>\n
Strava said it had excluded activities marked as private from the map.<\/p>\n
Users who record their exercise data on Strava have the option of making their movements public or private. Private data, the company said, has never been included.<\/p>\n
The appearance of military bases on the heatmap suggests that large numbers of military personnel across the globe have been publicly sharing their location data.<\/p>\n
The latest version of the map was released in November 2017, but the implications for service personnel were only raised over the weekend.<\/p>\n
Nathan Ruser, an Australian university student who first highlighted the issue, said he came across the map while browsing a cartography blog last week.<\/p>\n
“I just looked at it and thought, ‘oh hell, this should not be here – this is not good,'” he told the BBC.<\/p>\n
The location of military bases is generally well-known, both from local knowledge and pre-existing satellite imaging tools like Google Earth.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, concerns about Strava’s heatmap are mainly centred around the fact that it displays the level of activity – shown as more intense light – and the movement of personnel inside the walls.<\/p>\n
It also appears that location data has been tracked in the area outside bases – which may show commonly-used exercise routes or patrolled roads.<\/p>\n
Mr Ruser, 20, said he was shocked by how much detail he could see. “You can establish a pattern of life,” he said.<\/p>\n
The app is far more popular in the West than elsewhere – which means foreign military bases stand out as isolated “hotspots” in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
Other easily identifiable bases include those used by the US in Syria and Iraq, a UK RAF base in the Falklands, and one used by French forces in Niger. Activity was also visible at the Russian base at Hmeimim in Syria.<\/p>\n
Millions of users track their location data with Strava while exercising, often using a fitness tracker worn on the wrist or a smartphone to automatically upload their location as they jog or cycle.<\/p>\n
In an engineering blog post from November, Strava said the newest version of the map was built from one billion activities – some three trillion points of data, covering 27 billion km (17bn miles) of distance run, jogged, or swum.<\/p>\n
Strava released a brief statement highlighting that the data used had been anonymised, and “excludes activities that have been marked as private and user-defined privacy zones.”<\/p>\n
“We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share,” it said.<\/p>\n
The settings available in Strava’s app also allow users to explicitly opt out of data collection for the heatmap – even for activities not marked as private – or to set up “privacy zones” in certain locations.<\/p>\n
However there are now concerns around the security of the collected data, and the possibility for it to identify individual users.<\/p>\n
Mr Ruser, who is studying international security at the Australian National University, said anyone could have spotted the information.<\/p>\n
“I thought the best way to deal with it is to make the vulnerabilities known so they can be fixed,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Someone would have noticed it at some point. I just happened to be the person who made the connection.”<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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