LONDON: An interactive online map showing where people who use fitness devices such as Fitbit exercise has also revealed highly sensitive information about the movements of soldiers at US military bases.
Online fitness tracker Strava’s latest heat map was released in November 2018. It displays data captured from fitness fans the world over, recorded between 2015 and September 2017, which includes data shared by serving military personnel as they exercise in bases, including in Afghanistan.
The oversight has now hit international headlines after Nathan Ruser, a 20-year-old Australian university student, noticed the military issue while browsing a cartography blog last week.
Ruser told the BBC: “I thought the best way to deal with it is to make the vulnerabilities known so they can be fixed. Someone would have noticed it at some point. I just happened to be the person who made the connection.”
Strava insists the data it displays is made public by its users, but in a statement the company raised the point of checking privacy settings: “We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share,” the company said, adding a blogpost from 2017 detailing eight things users can do to control their privacy on the service, including opting out of the global heatmap.
Online fitness tracker Strava’s latest heat map was released in November 2018. It displays data captured from fitness fans the world over, recorded between 2015 and September 2017, which includes data shared by serving military personnel as they exercise in bases, including in Afghanistan.
The oversight has now hit international headlines after Nathan Ruser, a 20-year-old Australian university student, noticed the military issue while browsing a cartography blog last week.
Ruser told the BBC: “I thought the best way to deal with it is to make the vulnerabilities known so they can be fixed. Someone would have noticed it at some point. I just happened to be the person who made the connection.”
Strava insists the data it displays is made public by its users, but in a statement the company raised the point of checking privacy settings: “We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share,” the company said, adding a blogpost from 2017 detailing eight things users can do to control their privacy on the service, including opting out of the global heatmap.
