Fitness app Polar revealed not only where U.S. military personnel worked, but where they lived

By Rebecca Tan
July 18 at 6:00 AM

Less than seven months ago, a group of journalists and Internet sleuths reported that the fitness-tracking application Strava was revealing highly sensitive information about U.S. military personnel around the world, including in Iraq and Syria. The security breach, which alarmed lawmakers and Pentagon officials, prompted the U.S. military to launch a review of its guidelines for wireless devices at military facilities.

Now, a group of reporters in the Netherlands has found another fitness app that may have placed U.S. military personnel at even greater risk.

Until recently, a fitness app called Polar allowed virtually anyone to access the names, addresses and activities of thousands of soldiers and secret agents, wrote reporters at De Correspondent, a Dutch news website, and Bellingcat, a site that publishes citizen-journalist investigations. In an article published last week, the reporters explained how they were easily able to procure the personal information of more than 6,460 U.S. military and security personnel, including people working at the National Security Agency and the U.S. Secret Service.

Like Strava, Polar created an activity map that showed the exact routes where users exercised. But Polar also tracked and consolidated all the sessions of any single user onto that same map. By simply clicking on a user’s profile, the reporters were able to access that user's routes, heart rates and activities going as far back as 2014, making it far easier to follow any single user in Polar than it had been in Strava.

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