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There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user names. Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was

• FuriouslyAdrift 7mo ago
  It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/devices-and-apps-that-rely-on-geolocation-restricted-for-deployed-troops/ https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...
• wrsh07 7mo ago
  It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes" Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_heatmap_shows_clandestine_bases_because/ https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...
• wvbdmp 7mo ago
  To be fair, I would assume that the base, or in this case the carrier, is the only place where they would have the reception to broadcast their location, right? You probably don’t have cell service while out and about planting weapons on massacred civilians.
  • embedding-shape 7mo ago
    Typically you'd record your run with GPS, no need for cell service, sync it to your devices occasionally and that's when it might be uploaded, or later.
    • efitz 7mo ago
      Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.
      • manquer 7mo ago
        Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important. Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified. We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.
        • xp84 7mo ago
          Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.
          • nradov 7mo ago
            Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.
            • Terr_ 7mo ago
              It doesn't need to be anything nearly that dramatic as assassins, because economies of scale both lower the bar and make most attacks impersonal. Consider how odd it would be for someone in 2025 to say: "Computer security?I haven't done anything to personally offend a genius hacker." Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return. Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.
  • bigfatkitten 7mo ago
    Ships often have welfare networks, basically vanilla internet access for people to use to keep in touch with their families etc while deployed.
• dboreham 7mo ago
  Quick note that at least since WW2 there has been a technique where you know that the enemy is recording the location of something. So you add an offset to the signal they receive. Then they know where the thing is, but actually they do not. This was done with V2 missiles where the navigation system had a tendency to drift slightly one way (forget if it was north or south). British reported V2 strikes as occurring where Germany would expect them to occur if that navigation drift hadn't happened. Result Germans never fixed their navigation system.
  • YawningAngel 7mo ago
    I think the navigation system was OK, we just said the impacts were further West than they actually were so the V2s fell on East London instead
    • nswango 7mo ago
      To be pedantic: I think the actual story is about V1 drones. They did not have a navigation system as such, they were just aimed in a certain direction and with the right amount of fuel to fall out of the sky over the target. The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this. So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.
• laughing_man 7mo ago
  The CdG incident is a little more serious given that about 90% of attacking a ship is figuring out where it is. Land bases don't move around and tend to be known already.
  • NitpickLawyer 7mo ago
    TBF a carrier group cannot be hidden from near-peer adversaries. I remember seeing a project that used CV with open data sat providers that could find smaller boats than that. (iirc they used a wake classifier, as that was the most obvious tell, even if the boat was small enough to not have enough pixels for identification).
    • dzhiurgis 7mo ago
      Pretty sure they'd light up on basic yacht radar too.
• verisimi 7mo ago
  There was one in Antarctica too.