Advanced Denanonymization through Strava

It's too complex, and to keep a govt/ site secure, you'd need every person who runs round it to keep their info locked down. I think Strava will end up having specific "national-state privacy zones" where no runs ever appear in heatmaps and segments cannot be created

> "Give us a list of secret sites you don't want us to cover".

This seems like a non-starter to me. If the gov't hands out an accurate list, they've given out the secret and it's no longer under their control, negating the whole point of having secret sites. If they pollute the list with random, bogus (but plausible) data to reduce it's utility for discovering secret gov't locations, it also reduces the utility for Strava as well, as now there's random swaths of land where nothing is logged, despite there being nothing there.

I have to say, part of this seems like an opsec failure on the part of the various militaries and government agencies. I would hope that whomever is in charge of security at a sensitive facility would recognize that modern phones are general purpose computers that are, amongst other things, location aware. If a facility's location or whom works there is sensitive info, the security officer should probably be forbidding phones from being operated while on site, or even being brought to the site in the first place.

I think it's really a shame that Strava is taking so much heat. The heatmap was a really cool visualization and also useful to find out where people are running and biking, generally. And, it was created from tracks that people willing uploaded and made public, even if they didn't fully understand the privacy implications.

But it's also frightening that this data, stored indefinitely, is effectively a mass surveillance system. I was contacted by local law enforcement who had gotten my email address from Strava via an "official legal process" because I had ridden my bike in an area around the time a homicide occurred.

Chew on that. The police or the government have access to your whereabouts, just because someone stored them.

> don't use a service that gobbles your data up, no matter how free it is

we've conceded that option by living in a world where phones add GPS location data to cameras, you use pay-by-phone over cash, oystercards for public transport. I felt I was in control until I discovered a paragraph in the manual of the used BMW we'd bought about how to turn flash off.

Think about that: we are building cars with flash embedded in a browser wired op to a 3G+ modem and a car network bus whose vehicle motor data would be sufficient to identify where you are driving round Bristol (speed, time sitting at junctions, hill climbs inferred by RPM:speed), where you live, which school you drive you children to...