https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-...

https://gijn.org/stories/investigations-using-strava-fitness...

It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.

We are not talking about stealth vehicles.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.

Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.

Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.

Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.

Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.

Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.

Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and

A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.

B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.

  As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the 
  waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink 
  satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold 
  crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without 
  the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times 
  story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security 
  risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, 
  that it is hard to believe. 
  

Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?

then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location

not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself

imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible

However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS

I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though

The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm

This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.

The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.

Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.

Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).

Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.

I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?

Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures?

Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration?

Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?