Strava has developed a Global Heat Map that shows the exact whereabouts of people wearing fitness devices
Recently Strava, a GPS tracking company, released a global heat map that shows the exact whereabouts people who use fitness devices. However, this map has also resulted in a massive data breach as sensitive information about the locations and activities of soldiers at US military bases, the Washington Post has reported.
According to the article, the Global Heat Map, published by Strava, uses satellite information to map the locations and movements of subscribers to the company’s fitness service over a two-year period, by illuminating areas of activity.
However, the map is not live. It shows a pattern of accumulated activity from 2015 to September 2017. While the United States and Europe show bright lights because of the number of fitness band users in those regions, war zones and desert areas are dark barring a few scattered points that zoom into military bases in these war-hit regions.
The U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State said on Monday it is revising its guidelines on the use of all wireless and technological devices on military facilities as a result of the revelations.
The Global Heat Map was posted online in November 2017, but the information it contains was publicised Saturday only after a 20-year-old Australian student stumbled across it.
Nathan Ruser, who is studying international security and the Middle East, found out about the map from a mapping blog and was inspired to look more closely, he said, after a throwaway comment by his father, who observed that the map offered a snapshot of “where rich white people are” in the world.
It’s not just the United States’ military bases that are being exposed on the map. According to an article in The Daily Beast, the fitness-tracker app exposes security flaw at Taiwan’s missile command centre.
Another journalist, Adam Rawnsley, noticed a lot of jogging activity on the beach near a suspected CIA base in Mogadishu, Somalia, while a Twitter user said he had located a Patriot missile system site in Yemen.
In a statement to The Verge, Strave said “the map is an aggregated and anonymised view of over a billion activities uploaded to our platform.” The company says activities which are marked as private are not part of the global heat map. Another report in the Guardian points out that the Strava app also reveals locations of US bases in Afghanistan as soldiers are the sole users of the app in these areas.
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