Safety and security concerns have been expressed in many quarters in several countries after a fitness tracking app known as Strava, displayed the exercise route of military personnel in bases around the world.
The online fitness tracker appears to show the structure of foreign military bases in countries including Syria and Afghanistan as soldiers move around them.
San Francisco-based Strava which has 27 million users around the world, provides an app that uses a mobile phone's GPS to track a subscriber's exercise activity, showing the paths its users log as they run or cycle.
It utilises the collected data, as well as that of fitness devices such as Fitbit and Jawbone, to enable people check their own performances and compare them with others.
Strava says the newest version of the app has been built from one billion activities, some three trillion points of data, covering 27 billion km (17bn miles) of distance run, jogged or swum.
However, it is not a live map. The data aggregate the activities recorded between 2015 and September 2017.
Although the location of military bases is generally well-known and satellite imagery can display the outline of buildings, the heatmap can reveal which of them are most used, or the routes taken by soldiers.
It shows the level of activity shown as more intense light and the movement of personnel inside the walls.
Nathan Ruser, a 20-year-old Australian university student who is studying international security at the Australian National University and also works with the Institute for United Conflict Analysts, said he was shocked by how much detail he could see. "You can establish a pattern of life," he said.
Many years ago, operational security was a relatively simple matter of not being physically overheard by the enemy.
Well, no more. Our modern electronic age means that we all move around with a number of "signatures"; we send and receive a variety of signals, all of which can be tracked. And as the episode with the exercise tracker shows, you do not need to be an American or Russian spy to be able to see and analyse these signals.
A US Department of Defense spokeswoman, Maj Audricia Harris, said it took "matters like these very seriously and is reviewing the situation to determine if any additional training or guidance is required".
The UK's Ministry of Defence said it also took "the security of its personnel and establishments very seriously and keeps them under constant review" but would not comment on specific security arrangements.
BBC
