Who would have thought getting in shape could be so risky.
Fitness
apps help you track your runs, calories burned, and maybe even your heart rate.
If you happen to be using a Polar device and its associated app, however, that
information — in addition to small details like where you live — could end up
in the wrong hands.
Approximately
six months after researchers revealed that so-called Strava heatmaps allowed
for the identification of secret
overseas military bases, a joint effort from the Dutch De Correspondent and the open source investigative
site Bellingcat discovered that another fitness app was
making all kinds of user data public that, if it got into the wrong hands,
could do serious harm.
Specifically,
Bellingcat notes that Polar's Polar Flow app "is revealing the homes and lives
of people exercising in secretive locations, such as intelligence agencies,
military bases and airfields, nuclear weapons storage sites, and
embassies around the world."
A
big part of the problem appears to be that Polar allows users to view all the exercises
of a particular individual if that person decided to share them publicly to
Polar Flow's Explore map. So, for example, you can see the routes of a person
jogging near an airport in Iraq that happens to be near a military base
and also that the person in question likes to go for runs in the
Netherlands. And you can see where those runs start and stop.
In a
statement, the company stated it was suspending the Explore API but also denied
there was any leak of information.
"We
recently learned that public location data shared by customers via the Explore
feature in Flow could provide insight into potentially sensitive
locations," read the statement in part. "It is important to
understand that Polar has not leaked any data, and there has been no breach of
private data. Currently the vast majority of Polar customers maintain the
default private profiles and private sessions data settings, and are not
affected in any way by this case."
In
other words, according to Polar, the "Airmen involved in the battle
against the Islamic State" who Bellingcat researchers were able to
identify and find their homes were the ones who messed up, not Polar.
Keep
that in mind the next time you head out for a run. Oh, maybe also remember that
you might not be the only one following along.
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