[JJMcJ]

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 Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.

Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...

[wrsh07]

It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"

Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...

[dboreham]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Pretty sure they'd light up on basic yacht radar too.

[verisimi]

There was one in Antarctica too.

[wvbdmp]

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]

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]

Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

[manquer]

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]

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]

Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.

[Forgeties79]

No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default, so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt in most of the time

[embedding-shape]

Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.

[ebergen]

For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.

[dkga]

Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.

[alexfoo]

Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose.

a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.)

b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.

You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.

Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.

[iamacyborg]

> and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that

Which is weird, because if they bought a Garmin device, they already have all that built in.

[embedding-shape]

Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?

[LightBug1]

I agree with you ... but gotdamned if I don't see another unasked-for shared workout stat.

I have the family exercise group on mute, lol

[bigfatkitten]

Ships often have welfare networks, basically vanilla internet access for people to use to keep in touch with their families etc while deployed.