Well, dang. :smack: I guess it’s a good thing somebody noticed this.
There are some interesting pictures with the article.
First Pokemon Go! Now this?
Okay this comment I respect!
I was going for a rhyme based on “loose lips sink ships” but came up with nothing.
I thought that this was a well known vulnerability. Here in the states bike thieves would break into the garages where Strava indicated there were likely high end bikes. In fact, riders who set Strava records were considered to have the nicest bikes.
But that Strava ‘heat map’ is very interesting to look at. I’ve found some places near me that I didn’t know people were riding bikes at. I’ll be visiting them soon.
You think the Russians don’t already know those bases are there? Or the Taliban?
Anyone with half a brain sets a zone of privacy around their house on Strava so the exact position isn’t known.
I’d be interested to know if the heatmap included private rides? That would indeed be a balls-up by Strava.
You have more faith in people than I do.
I feel we are a nation of people who’s VCR’s fashed 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 for a decade and a half.:rolleyes:
My friend’s son asked me the what time it was, I held out my arm (wrist watch) he looked at it and said “That’s cool…so what time is it?”:smack:
I don’t dare show him a magnetic compass. ( It’s like GPS for older people kid)
Yeah I know, I wandered a bit off topic, but don’t worry I’ll forgive me.
There’s a conspiracy theory that this was the point of Pokemon Go in the first place. The founder of the company that made the game has business ties to In-Q-Tel which is a venture capital funded by the government, which invests in technologies they believe the intelligence agencies might find useful.
By having users run around taking geotagged pictures all over the place, they could use the game to create street-level maps of the world, like Google Street View but it wouldn’t be tied to roads. And they could have users perform surveillance on a person or a location by spawning valuable Pokemons in the vicinity.
http://blackbag.gawker.com/pokemon-go-is-a-government-surveillance-psyop-conspirac-1783461240
Stray apps kill chaps.
It sounds like the level of detail being captured could actually be leveraged to get information about the layout and organisational structure of the bases, not just their location.
Loose hips save ships.
CMC fnord!
Clearly, that is the main concern.
And people with 3/4 of a brain don’t record their private info on the web in the first place. Unless you need to prove to someone that you biked/hiked/ran a specific path, I don’t see the point. An aggregated total of miles/minutes by hour/day/week, etc. I can understand, but storing the actual route baffles me. Of course, I’m not a runner or biker.
Toned hips reveal blips.
Except that even intelligent people often use default settings on their devices for convenience. And even if you make the effort to secure your personal data, there is little that prevents companies from using and selling the aggregate data freely, which even without personally identifiable information could be used along with correlating information to ‘back out’ the owner. Regardless, data of this kind can be used by a neferious actor to determine movement patterns and discern confidential information.
golf clap
Stranger
Plus, information about where the military train or exercise. My understanding is that the privacy settings are “opt out” so that the default is you allow the company to release your data. And some analyst on NPR was explaining that it wasn’t so trivial to figure out how to adjust the privacy settings appropriately.
It’s partly an online community, even if you only connect with a few friends. It is also a way to compete with others. Segments of road are tracked and times recorded. A cyclist or runner can see how they fair against themselves, their friends, and the fastest ever. It is great motivation for improving your fitness.
Reading further I see that the published heat map is only of public activities and excludes private activities and zones. The security breach has come from the military personnel, not Strava.
Let’s see now, I open my phone app, go to settings, privacy, tick the “private by default” option. Seems trivial to me but perhaps I’m some kind of genius.
Should privacy be opt out rather than opt in? Possibly. On the other hand people need to take some responsibility for themselves and not rely on the rest of the world to hold their hand.
Private by default is a bit pointless really, the whole point of the app is to share your activities with other users.
The latest reporting I read points out that a close look at the Afghan data shows the most popular routes between the various sites. While the sites themselves are interesting, the actual routes and the likelihood that soldiers will be traveling on them is significantly more serious. The app records whether the user is traveling by vehicle.
Sigh.
Strava is rather helplessly pointing out that if people would just read the instructions they could have turned off the data collection in specific areas.
A bunch of people will be getting an urgent security briefing about now…