Soldiers from the Israeli Defense Forces recite morning prayers during survival training at an unidentified base.everal years ago, Strava, a data-hungry, fitness-cum-social network app, published a heatmap showing every activity ever logged, over 3 trillion data points. Neat, right? It was. Problematic, too.
It’s the only such incident FakeReporter found, but the researchers believe it’s plausible—even likely—that someone has used the same ploy to rake up user information beyond the 2018 incident in Israel. FakeReporter’s conclusions demonstrate how difficult it can be for even well-intentioned users to protect their identities, a problem going much past Strava with location-tracking almost a default among mobile apps today.
Obvious how? For starters, the user logged runs in straight, geometrically perfectly lines. No one really runs like that. Moreover, the user did things like complete a roughly three-quarter mile run in zero seconds. At an Israeli Air Force base, the user ran 2.5 miles in 4 minutes. The world record for a mile run is 3 minutes and 43 seconds.
So the heatmap? Yeah, that was bad. But Segments pose an even greater security risk. The map showed, generally, where the military might be. Segments produce a specific list of the people in the military.
Surely if you’re on a secret mission the last thing you do is upload to social media?