The Strava Heatmap Incident

66  2018-01-29 by Paranoidsbible

Strava is an app aimed at athletes and your day-to-day exercisers. It tracks you VIA GPS, provides you various metrics and pieces of information, and claims to be the social network for athletes.

Earlier today Tobias Schneider of Twitter made a tweet about Strava's newly released heat map feature. Inside Schneider's tweet, he mentions locating military bases. While concerning, it does provide an interesting and alternative view of the world, besides finding military installations or hidden compounds.

One of the more interesting (and frightening) aspects of Strava is that you can actually scrape information from it and make a list of routes, people who traveled it, and a list of users. This was noted by Paul D of Twitter.

So, folks, thought you'd find this ongoing event interesting.

16 comments

1  canitbe73 2018-01-29

Countdown til the end of Strava has already begun.

1  romantic_corgi 2018-01-29

It was a shit app anyway

1  canitbe73 2018-01-29

There's a joke here about it being a shit app and so many people currently shittingt their pants about this app, but honestly I'm not smart enough to figure it out.

1  romantic_corgi 2018-01-29

I used it and found other apps to be better especially since this was geared towards biking. It was not my cuppa tea

1  Knobjockeyjoe 2018-01-29

Strava is definately the best sport related app, Ive tried all the others and its what all my friends and other mountain biking competitors use daily for training.

1  alleks88 2018-01-29

Best App for cycling. Running, not so much

1  romantic_corgi 2018-01-29

Ironically I preferred runkeeper for cycling

1  Paranoidsbible 2018-01-29

Can't wait until the damage control happens.

1  canitbe73 2018-01-29

I can literally only imagine what tomorrow morning is going to look like for some people!

1  Paranoidsbible 2018-01-29

If they wake up in the morning. I sense some people being ghosted for not checking their phone in at check-in.

1  AmishAtomicPhysicist 2018-01-29

https://imgur.com/a/DqMT1

1  baebaebokchoy 2018-01-29

Antartica?

1  BoltedGates 2018-01-29

Yes, and there are more from there as well.

1  TheRadChad 2018-01-29

Should make a post with your findings

1  MellowEpistle 2018-01-29

This popped up today as a problem at Pine Gap in NT. Showed the patrol GPS journey.

1  Knobjockeyjoe 2018-01-29

Everyone who uses strava knows this, thats why they have a built in privacy button if you enable it... You can griend or unfriend and adjust your privacy like facebook so others cant see where you start and finish, i.e your home/base your routine & others or where your 10k push bike lives for the thieves. There is no new discovery here, I was using it 5 ago for those exact features.

1  romantic_corgi 2018-01-29

I used it and found other apps to be better especially since this was geared towards biking. It was not my cuppa tea