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news
Strava Heatmap GCHQ.PNGStrava accused of giving away military secrets through its Global Heatmaps
Security agencies and defence chiefs worldwide will today be assessing what action to take following the revelation that details of military bases, including what are believed to be secret sites, are being made public through Strava Global Heatmaps.
Exercise activity, whether running, cycling or swimming, uploaded by users of the social network allows Strava to create its Heat Maps, relaunched late last year with unprecedented levels of detail.
The collective data has applications in areas such as urban planning since they allow local transport authorities to see, for example, exactly which roads are most popular among cycle commuters so could benefit from improved infrastructure.
But as the Guardian reports, the popularity of the app among military personnel, who through their training are fitter than the average person with many also taking part in sport in their free time, has raised security concerns.
In terms of UK military and intelligence bases, both domestic sites such as the Government Communications Headquarters(GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire and overseas ones, for example, RAF Mount Pleasant on the Falkland Islands, can clearly be seen.
RAF Mount Pleasant (source Strava Global Heatmaps)
Zooming in further on the latter map, individual buildings can be clearly identified, as well as the most popular routes that personnel who happen to be users of Strava take out of it, and where they are likely to go.
The availability of data relating to military bases was initially noticed by Nathan Ruser, who is an analyst at the Institute for United Conflict Analysts.
He said that while Strava’s presentation of the data “looks very pretty” it was “not amazing for Op-Sec” [operational security].
“US bases are clearly identifiable and mappable,” he continued.
“If soldiers use the app like normal people do, by turning it on tracking when they go to do exercise, it could be especially dangerous,” for example when they run the same route daily.
It is in bases where personnel are on active duty, or that are located in combat zones – such as Camp Bastion in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, that the availability of Strava Global Heatmap data can be most compromising to security and safety.
Camp Bastion (source Strava Global Heatmaps)
The example below shows the United States Naval Expeditionary Base Camp Lemonnier, south of Djibouti City in the Horn of Africa and from where drone strikes are launched into Somalia and Yemen.
Camp Lemonnier (source Strava Global Heatmaps)
But the Guardian points out the appearance of another, smaller base that appears in the bottom left of the picture but is not marked on maps.
It is believed to be a CIA ‘black site’, that is an unofficial location used to detain and interrogate prisoners, which was identified a week before Strava published its latest Heat Map by analyst Markus Ranum.
Site southwest of Camp Lemmonier (source Strava Global Heatmaps)
Strava said: "Our Global Heatmap represents an aggregated and anonymised view of over a billion activities uploaded to our platform.
“It excludes activities that have been marked as private and user-defined privacy zones.
“We are committed to helping people better understand our settings to give them control over what they share.”
The company added that further information regarding privacy could be found on this blog post on its website, where users can find out for example how to opt out of having their data collected for Strava Global Heatmaps.
https://blog.strava.com/privacy-14288/
The fact that sensitive military installations can be identified and analysed through Strava is likely in the short term to lead to restrictions in the range of devices military personnel are able to use to track their fitness, and what they permitted to do with the data.
Existing restrictions, such as those imposed by the US Marine Corps, which allows some Bluetooth- and GPS-enabled devices on base, are likely to be tightened up further.
In the longer term, it’s not inconceivable that individual countries may introduce legislation looking to limit the use of Strava in some way, or regulate the data it captures and restrict how it is used.
As analyst Tobias Schneider, noted: “In Syria, known coalition bases ligily.ht up the night.
“Some light markers over known Russian positions, no notable colouring for Iranian bases,” he added.
“A lot of people are going to have to sit through lectures come Monday morning.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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41 comments
My heat map stops at my privacy zones so you might want to check you have you have them set up right.
Shock news: Strava reveals that there are personnel on military bases...
Where's the bit where Strava is "accused of giving away military secrets"? Granted I haven't read all the media coverage of this, but I've yet to see any accusation levelled at them (they are, after all, simply presenting data that users have chosen to make public) nor has any such accusation been cited in this article.
Did you actually read the headline of that article above?
Indeed, did you? Headline says Strava has been accused of... Yet the article doesn't describe any accusation being levelled at Strava. Even Mssrs Ruser and Schneider appear to suggest that individual users are at fault here.
As I said in another post, this is trial by media. Roadcc in the headline you say you read, and various other media sources have accused Strava. "Too much onus placed on the user to apply settings" said one. Of course that is bollocks. Anybody party to even the most trivial of military secrets has to sign appropriate documents (official secrets act in UK) saying they will not share or transmit such by any means, far less send it to a social media site!
Apologies, I think you've misunderstood my point, probably due to me being unclear. I don't think road.cc are accusing Strava; I think they are reporting that Strava have been acused. My point being that the content of the article contains nothing to the effect of an accusation towards Strava. Even if other media sources are accusing Strava, it's poor journalism on road.cc's part not to reference anything to support their headline.
I understand what you mean, but my issue is that in writing such emotive headlines as this, and then writing an article about Strava, which this is, they are in essence already pointing the finger at Strava, evidence or no. This is how smearing by the press works. This article should be about military personnel uploading GPS coordinates to social media sites, not about Strava. Buried deep within the Guardian article is a reference to a 2016 ban by the US Marines on wearable fitness devices containing cellular or wifi capability, photographic, audio or video capture, so this is not really new, and these guys are already breaking their own regulations.
So who accused them? If road.cc don't know then it points to this story being fed to them from the same source as all the other 'news' outlets.
The line taken in most of these pieces is that this is some type of breach by Strava or, at least, something they should have done something about. Am I missing the headlines where stupid people who work in important jobs are doing stupid things?
This is the important detail that most people covering this story seem to be missing. I suppose I feel a bit of frustration on Strava's part.
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