
This makes me glad
That I don't do much/any exercise. Least of all with one of these portable telescreens.
Online investigations outfit Bellingcat has found that fitness tracking kit-maker Polar reveals both the identity and daily activity of its users - including soldiers and spies. Many users of Polar's devices and app appear not to have paid attention to their privacy settings, as a result a Bellingcat writer found 6,460 …
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Yes, and apparently there have been cases of people using data from... I forgot - Strava? - to find out who owns high end bikes in order to nick them.
One thing, though, as a preemptive comment (also as a reminder for myself!): the readership of ElReg is likely [0] _not_ a cross section of society when it comes to educated use of that stuff, privacy concerns, or technical knowledge. And while I too bask in the smug feeling of superiority[1] of not having been in that data dump[2], nor in the CA / Faceborg data[3] (and others...) we should probably be a bit less "told ya so!! stoopid muggles!!one!eleven1!" (paraphrased).
So, one question to all of us: Can we do something? I know that educating users is... tedious, and educating people about personal privacy, control of information, basic operational security is an uphill battle, but can't we all try and educate one or two persons each about it? They don't have to become as paranoid as some people here. Do you have strategies to deal with that?
[0] p-almost-sure
[1] who doesn't have this?
[2] yes, I exercise. Yes, I use gps to track my runs / bike rides (new routes, at least, interesting to find out just where I got lost) - no, they are never put on any portal.
[3] ok, except very likely indirectly - we are all in there unless you have never had any contact with people using any f'book stuff
Strava have a privacy feature where you can hide any track that lies within 1km of the fixed points you specify. So you can mark your house and office and automatically remove the first/last parts of your activities.
Obviously people know roughly where you live and work, just not the exact house to visit to steal your bike.
yeah, but these just allow you to triangulate House/office/other by taking endpoints at 1km and drawing circles to find where they intersect.
they have to ad some randomness, but even then NCC Group will probably be able to work it out from the selfies you put on insta/fb/tw/et. al
On the Strava settings page:
Enter a location (i.e. your home or office) below to have an area surrounding that location made private on your activity maps and not shared with others on Strava. To increase obscurity, the location you submit will not be centered within the privacy zone you create. If your activity starts or ends within the location you specify, the start and/or end of the activity will be hidden from other users.
You don't have to remote any applications, the cloud element of the service publishes all your data nicely formatted so anyone driving past can take a look as people like to share (boast) about steps made, miles cycled etc.
The people using similar user names across other services can then have data linked from other drive by sources with minimal effort, to arrive at where you live, what you look like, who your family is, where you work, etc.
regards
Giovani
...and that includes any large enough set of people, including that of Noble prize winners, apparently. Unfortunately I can't seem to find the study that I remember reading about, that reached that particular conclusion.
This keeps being reported as a security flaw, but there really isn't a problem. I don't know much about Polar, but Strava, Garmin and Suunto all make it very easy to keep everything private if that's what you want. But that's not what most people want - the entire reason for using these services and uploading everything to somewhere cloudy is to compare and compete with other people. It's a complete waste of time having "researchers" "discover" that you can find out where people do exercise and that happens to often be near home or work, because that's the whole bloody point of these apps in the first place. It's like writing an article about Twitter with the revelation that things you post on it can be seen by other people. Deliberate publication with the intent of being seen by other people is not a data leak.
Is it because "Talking Heads" constantly use "The Innocent Have Nothing to Hide"™ to guilt people?
Or are App developers, by making privacy so difficult, are taking advantage of peep's laziness so they (the developers) can profit from the data? "Sharing is Caring!!!*"™
*Three exclamation marks to indicate the (forced) manic happiness needed when expressing this statement.
It's bizarre that the default settings for anything involved with personal information seem to be "share will anyone that cares to look"
And I really must be getting very old but I'm baffled by people's desire/apathy to have their every movement tracked, whether it's running around the park, visiting your granny, or taking the bins out.
I've just come back from a lovely weekend away but I must be very strange because I don't feel any compulsion to advertise it on faecesbook or twitter, and while I was away, I didn't enable the satnav on my phone and sign up to "please-track-my-every-movement-and-post-it-on-the-internet.com"
Jeez! What is wrong with me?????!!!!!!
Yet you had the impulse to come and share that information on the public comments site of an internationally published IT news website?
So in response to your request to understand "Jeez! What is wrong with me?????!!!!!!" I'd suggest it's a dose of unqualified "smug bastard-ness" with a light infection of hypocrisy.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should, if ludditry is your game of choice.
whats the problem here? looking at the deluge of run stats posted on my facebook feed, i get the sense runners dont mind their information being public. Seems they might even like the service to go one step further and laser the information to my brain via my optic nerve, so i can never do anything without first knowing where and when and how far they've run today.