Fitness service revealed the locations of US secret objects.

This is the Global Heat Map at the maximum distance. If you enlarge the map, you can track the paths of users of fitness trackers connected to Strava

For several years, the Strava social network for athletes has been providing everyone with access to a map showing the routes of people with fitness trackers. This map is called Global Heat Map . With the help of data on the location of fitness tracker users (these are mainly GPS coordinates), the service shows the routes of the owners of these devices.

This is done so that other users of the service can use existing routes. The idea turned out to be quite popular - the number of users of the social network has already reached 27 million people worldwide. Some time after launching the Global Heat Map, it turned out that this map allows you to determine the location of military bases and personnel behavior patterns. One of the first to notice this was Nathan Ruser. He also posted separate sections of the “heat” card on Twitter.


It turned out that on the map one can not only see secret objects, but also understand what those who work and live in these objects are doing. After carefully studying these cards, you can get a rough idea of ​​where people train, work, and even sleep. Naturally, such data jeopardize very many classified objects (mostly military) from different countries. Most often it is the United States, whose soldiers use fitness trackers and smart watches in great numbers.

As an example, we can cite a heat map of one of the classified objects in the desert.


There are clearly visible routes of movement of the inhabitants of the base in almost any scale. Anyone who views the map can identify military bases in Syria, Afghanistan and other countries. And you can consider not only those objects that are known, but also those that are top-secret.

The company itself said that in the settings of the social network, you can set different levels of privacy. The card itself “shows a unified view of more than a billion user activities loaded onto the platform. It also excludes activities that are marked as confidential. ” Accordingly, if the tracker does transmit data in the secret zone, then the user who has not set the required level of confidentiality is to blame.

In addition to the US bases, users also discovered the bases of the French military forces in the West African state of Mali. Here the French spend anti-terrorist operations for some time.

Representatives of the Pentagon said that the agency is studying the situation, if necessary, additional measures will be taken to ensure the security of military personnel at home and abroad.

Interestingly, immediately after it became known about the identification of American bases and objects belonging to other states, some experts said that Russian bases could not be detected using sports tracker applications. In particular, Viktor Murakhovsky, a military expert, said : "They (trackers) are not used in the service, especially during operations or exercises." With regard to the Americans, he spoke as follows: “Such disorderlessness is surprising: how not to comply with the requirements for cyber and electronic security?”.

Nevertheless, the base of the Global Heat Map has already discovered the base of the Russian Armed Forces on Khmeimim, where there is at least one Russian or Syrian military, using either a tracker or a smartphone with the corresponding application. A spokesman for the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, said : “The fact that the use of cloud technologies in various applications related to everyday life, health, fitness, etc., certainly makes the actions of any person as transparent as possible, is obvious.” Actually, it is really obvious, it is strange that the military did not take care of all this before. Now the secret objects that appeared on the Strava map will have to do something to remain secret.