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Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
The number of adversaries who can track a vessel at sea live via satellite is much smaller than the number who can scrape Strava.
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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.
Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.
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.
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If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say that it's not a big deal that an adversary capable of threatening an aircraft carrier knows where it generally is. What is a big deal is knowing precisely where it is when an undetected projectile needs pinpoint accuracy moments before blowing a big hole in it.
It’s impossible for any projectile to come towards an aircraft carrier of the US and not be detected. Technically impossible. You’re only hope is that they don’t have CIWS turned on. A 20mm Vulkan cannon of computerized vision models pointed right at you.
The CIWS is radar guided.
Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.
An intelligence satellite - which is not a super common utility nations have - will locate where the aircraft _was_ X hours ago, or at least many minutes ago. A constantly updated missile with a rather simple GPS tracker would benefit A LOT from a live location of its target.
There are very few attack modes which are enabled by this. The ship is a giant slow moving metallic object. You just need to get relatively close. Guidance will easily do the rest.
The real problem is not seeing the instantaneous location of the ship. It's being able to draw a line on a map such that you know it's likely destination and time of arrival.
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Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.
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 o…
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There might be some secret technology that we're unaware of but as far as we know magnetometers can only be used to detect underwater targets at very short ranges. I highly doubt that they're used on military reconnaissance satellites.
Subs produce a surface level displacement wake that can be detected by SAR.
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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 publi…
imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory
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It is important to note the Naval Gazing article is specifically talking about the difficulties of actually targeting a ship for a successful kill rather than just tracking it. It's in response to the idea that satellites plus missiles would mean carriers could be instantly destroyed in a first round of hostilities with a sufficiently prepared opponent. Tracking is a lot easier to do than getting data fresh and preci…
It also seems worth considering that the article's view that "spending a lot of time searching for the carrier is a good way to get killed by defending fighters" is a distinctly pre-drone-ubiquity assumption. Can a carrier group's point defense weapons and fighters reliably counter a swarm of hundreds of cheap drones, flying lower than cloud cover, that are programmed to look for carriers over a wide area, confirm th…
This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a combination of naïveté, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced. It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.