GPS company Strava released a Global Heat Map which revealed locations of their users that use their app for running and other purposes. Strava's GPS tech is used in many fitness trackers like Fitbit which led to a lot of data being collected from users. 

Many of these users are military personnel that work at sensitive and secret bases around the world. Secret military bases and their locations are not known to the general public, however, thanks to Strava, anyone connected to Wi-Fi can track people at these bases easily. People have already spotted secret bases in Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan. 

© Fitbit

What's worse is that Strava's data can reveal the identities of users by combining the date from the heatmap. Stravas claimed the data was anonymised before they released the heat map, but according to a report by Wired, it is not the case. It was found that people can identify users with the combined data from Strava's own website. 

© Strava

Strava's website enables users to create “segments”, a small area where friends and users can compete with each other for the best running time. Each segment has its own leaderboard which can be accessed by anyone on Strava's website. These leaderboards have names of individual Strava users which essentially means anyone can identify a user's name easily. 

Many people have already used the website to identify soldiers and military personnel who work at secret military bases. The Guardian was able to identify at least 50 soldiers who work on a base in Afghanistan.

Strava put out a statement yesterday saying that it is, “committed to working with military and government officials to address potentially sensitive data,” which might have come too late. The data is already available on the Internet for people to access and have already led to military bases and personnel being identified. 

Source: Wired