Strava fitness app ‘reveals US military bases’

Data published online showing the whereabouts of people who have been using Strava fitness devices appears to have revealed sensitive information about the location and movements of members of the US military.

The map, which had been available online since November last year, used data uploaded by users to create a heatmap of jogging and cycling routes.

Australian student Nathan Ruser, who revealed the issue on Saturday, said the map “looks very pretty, but not amazing for Op-Sec [Operational Security]. US Bases are clearly identifiable and mappable.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Washington Post reports that cities in the US and Europe show up as “blazes of light” because of the amount of activity, but in warzones such as Iraq and Syria the map “becomes almost entirely dark — except for scattered pinpricks of activity” which align with known US bases, and other “potentially sensitive sites”.

Zooming in on one of the US bases “clearly reveals its internal layout, as mapped out by the tracked jogging routes of numerous soldiers”, says The Guardian.

The heatmap also appears to highlight RAF Mount Pleasant in the Falkland Islands and a base used by French soliders in Niger.

In a statement, Strava said that the data it used to create the map had been anonymised, and "excludes activities that have been marked as private and user-defined privacy zones." But this morning the map appears to have been taken offline.