Numerous fitness trackers and fitness apps let you track your progress and find the best running and walking routes in your city. But sometimes such programs can pose a threat to national security. This is exactly what happened with the Strava application, whose users accidentally gave out the coordinates of the military bases of the United States and other countries to everyone.
The fact is that Strava gives you a general access to the global map of the world, which marks the routes for training. Moreover, the more popular the route, the brighter it appears on the Strava map. Large cities, which is logical, are completely covered by a network of such routes. But what was the surprise of users when they found bright places in the desert regions of Syria and Afghanistan. Military analyst Nathan Raser was the first to respond to this on his Twitter account.
“Strava’s work is amazing, but from a military safety standpoint, there’s nothing exciting about it: the online tool allows you to clearly see the location and layout of military facilities, routes inside and outside the bases.”
But that's not all. The user's online identifier allows you to see a specific person who passed a given route and find out about all his movements, which indicates the poor anonymity of the application. In a short period of time, it was possible to find objects on the Strava map that are not available on public satellite maps like Google Maps or Apple maps. Now the military is analyzing the consequences of publishing a map on the Web, and Strava developers argue that you should not worry, because the application contains security settings that allow you to set private zones on the map.
Vladimir Kuznetsov