Fitness App Exposes Growing Challenge of Military Planning in the Age of Digital Connection

The disclosure of the location of the French aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, by a French navyman’s fitness app is spotlighting the difficulty of creating the element of secrecy in war, with technology playing an outsized role in the success and failure of sneak attacks and clandestine missions. Le Monde newspaper reported Thursday that it was able to track the location of a sailor running laps around the top of the aircraft carrier stationed with a flotilla off the coast of Cyprus because he was recording his biostatistics on the Strava app, a popular platform for fitness freaks to share their workouts socially. The sailor, whose real name was changed by the newspaper in its report, has been sharing his location on Strava for more than a month. On February 14, he gave away his location while jogging off the Cotentin coast of France, Later that month, he was spotted aboard the carrier at Copenhagen before the ship made a stop at Malmö, Sweden, on the other side of the Øresund Strait in early March.An Armed Forces General Staff spokesman told the French daily that the broadcast of the sailor’s location via the application “does not comply with the instructions in force” on “digital hygiene” of which “sailors are regularly made aware” before any deployment.“Appropriate measures will be taken by the command,” the staff member told the newspaper. But the embarrassing revelation isn’t the first time the app has given away sensitive location information. Strava has long exposed sensitive locations thanks to its use by military members, including in 2018 when soldiers outlined the perimeter of secret U.S. military bases in Syria and Afghanistan while going for a group jog.LeMonde ran a series of articles in 2024 and 2025 on what it calls “Stravaleaks,” which included the disclosure of locations of high-profile individuals like Presidents Putin, Macron, Biden, and Trump through their bodyguards’ profiles.Separately, location data on social media upended a NATO Arctic exercise in 2018 when local Norwegians spotted dozens of American, British, and German troops scrolling on Tinder. The disclosure of open-source intelligence like location data, commonly known as OSINT, doesn’t end with careless service members recording their workouts and looking for hookups. OSINT satellite imagery enables anyone to zoom in on the location of deployed fleets, aircraft positions on base tarmacs, and other military materiel and personnel.A senior researcher in phishing, spyware, and disinformation at the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, John Scott-Railton, said the location of the French fleet in the Mediterranean was not a secret, but what is revealing, and potentially useful, is an assessment of their situational awareness while aboard the ships. Every signal — satellites, shipspotting, transponders, and the like — which reveals the movement of a ship is useful, he said. “Strava emits some useful signals: For example, someone is probably not jogging around the deck when a carrier is doing flight ops or prepping for them. It also indicates things about what might be happening based on that person’s role: when they are jogging, they aren’t manning their other role in the Combat Information Center … etc etc,” he wrote on X.“This is simply another data flow that is undesirable and seemingly impossible to stop,” Mr. Scott-Railton continued, noting that while militaries take counter-deception maneuvers all the time, the Strava leaks are “diagnostic of an unauthorized use problem.” The virtual elimination of privacy could be “problematic” on the frontlines for countries like the United States, providing a big gift to hostile governments, he said.

Fitness App Exposes Growing Challenge of Military Planning in the Age of Digital Connection

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