France's aircraft carrier located in real time by Le Monde through fitness app

I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea.

We are not talking about stealth vehicles.

An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles.

So the entire Spanish coast, Moroccan coast, Algerian coast, mallorca, sardegna, Sicily, tunesia, the Greek isles, and who knows how many cruise ships, fishing vessels, and commercial aircraft all saw this ship.

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.

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

This is a repeating phenomenon, and probably worse on land. Fitness and run tracking apps also reveal troop locations and concentrations on land (location clusters reported by apps targeted at non-local-language audiences stick out like a sore thumb).

IIRC USA had similar issues with soldiers using Strava exposing secret bases[0]. I wonder wat kind of connectivity they had, was it Satellite internet for the carrier or did it sync once they got close to the shore? For the first one maybe they should switch to whitelist and not whitelist Strava.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats

How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?

Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).

It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"

It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades.

Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.

Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:

  As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the 
  waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink 
  satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold 
  crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without 
  the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times 
  story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security 
  risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, 
  that it is hard to believe.

https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...

More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.

Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.

Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.

Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.

Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.

Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and

A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.

B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.

All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.

Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?

Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740

That's nothing, we also have this: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker

What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there

then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location

not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself

imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible

However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS

I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though

The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm

Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards.

This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.

The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.

Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.

Yes OPSEC is hard, and they should be trained to not do this, but it seems to be getting ridiculous. If I were in command of such units, I'd certainly be calling for packet inspection and a large blacklist restriction of apps like that (and the research to back it up).

Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.

I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because of the Applewatch.

Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.

Many questions:

I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?

Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures?

Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration?

Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.

About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using Tinder.

Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then, they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was most displeased—moving a brigade headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.

There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user names.

Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.

Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.

I agree with Ukraine, but only when it comes to the first two or so years of the war, by now most of those that didn’t respect those rules (I’m talking both sides) are either dead or missing some limbs. With that told, just recently the Russian MOD has started applying heavy penalties to its soldiers close to the frontlines who were still using Telegram and/or the Ukrainian mobile network (?!), so it looks like there are still some behaviors left to correct.

Is an aircraft carrier's location supposed to be secret? Pretty hard to hide from a satellite I'd imagine.

Maybe it was just an old stupid treason? Someone against the war and… hard to believe there are no rules about location.

I don't know about Strava, but my Apple Watch will detect when I'm going on a walk or a bike ride and ask if I want to track it. I just instinctively say yes. Strava might do the same and so it could just be habit for the sailor and a dumb mistake.

I would have thought so too but Naval Gazing has a short series [0] on why it's not as dire as one might think. An aircraft carrier's location being "secret" in this case is just one layer of the survivability onion [1] anyhow. (Caveat that as someone who takes a casual interest in this, I can't vouch for accurate this is at all.)

[0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1

[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...

It's pretty hard to hide it from anything. Its surface is ~17000 m² (a tennis court is ~260 m²), and is 75 m high (~ 25 floors building - probably half of it under water, but still). And that's a mid-sized carrier according to Wikipedia.

It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).

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 like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider. The data will always be at least an hour old and that’s a hundred times as long as it takes for the person to be impossibly labor-intensive to find. Carriers are easier to find once you’re on the ocean in close proximity than someone in a city is, but then so are you — and the carrier has armed warplanes whose job is to prevent you from being within observational distance of the carrier in realtime.

It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work. Do they drop a buoy with a giant inflating stop sign on it? Fly Tholian-webs perpendicular to the sailing path?

I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes

Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.

Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.

No need to make it easier though

True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too

About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using Tinder.

I'd guess it also risks exposing a specific account as a crew member, making them trackable back on shore; particularly if you're uploading the same routes

True, but think about the reverse: being able to flag a strava user as being part of the french navy can be valuable too

Maybe it was fake. Someone with a water-borne drone and Starlink could spoof it, in order to throw those pesky Iranians off the scent. Unless you were on the aircraft carrier, had satellite imagery or could physically see it, it would be hard to prove that it was a fake. Any attempt at debunking would meet fierce resistance from Strava bros.

There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user names.

Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.

Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.

It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...

It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"

Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...

[0] https://www.navalgazing.net/Carrier-Doom-Part-1

[1] https://www.goonhammer.com/star-wars-armada-naval-academy-wa...

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 precise enough to hit the ship with no other tools (eg ships already nearby that can get a live precise track vs terminal detection and guidance on the missile itself).

Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.

Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.

Well everything's impossible, until its not.

TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.

It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.

It's not built for hiding at all, that's what submarines are for (and that's where our nukes are).

But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.

Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.

> It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider.

Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking.

> It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work.

Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.

I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.

Satellite images are not always real time. Also satellites can be affected by things like cloud cover.

For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather.

I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.

[0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

Strava tracks can also be spoofed and you have no guarantee for them to appear on a schedule either. I just find this to be on the sensationalist side of "data" journalism lacking any sort of contextualization or threat level assessment. Unless there was evidence of some more sensitive locations that have not been published along this story, it looks like some serious unserious case of journalism to me.

Clouds only affect a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Plenty of satellite constellations use synthetic aperture radar, for example, which can see ships regardless of cloud cover. There are gaps in revisit rates, especially over the ocean, but even that has come way down.

Le Monde making use of what's actually available to them in real time—is the story here.

It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...

It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"

Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...

Oh I get it, the onion is made of Swiss cheese.

TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.

Also the capabilities of commercial and government geospatial systems has only continued to improve in the ~decade since the article was written.

Well everything's impossible, until its not.

Well clearly since the De Gaulle is using a fitness app it's working on it.

I'm pretty sure if you don't have a working radio in int'l waters you'd be assumed to be a pirate vessel and promptly boarded/shot at yes.

No need to make it easier though

You don't need to confirm anything. You just configure it once to upload your runs that you record on a Garmin watch or whatever, and forget. It's not impossible to use Garmin watch without any online accounts and uploading your data anywhere, but as it is with all wearables today, they intentionally make your life harder for it. Not to mention that most people who run regularly use Strava or something equivalent to track your workouts anyway, so one really wouldn't think much about it, unless explicitly forced by officers to disconnect everything. And, honestly, given how easy it is to find an aircraft carrier (for god's sake, even a civilian can do that!), I doubt that it even worth it. Le Monde is just making cheap scandal out of nothing. As always.

Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the world could spoof it.

But the ocean is very very huge to find it still.

You don't have to search the entire planet. A carrier's general location is always semi-public. There are websites dedicated to tracking them, just like jets. And carriers roll with an entire strike group of 8-10 ships and 5-10K personnel, which are together impossible to miss.

A carrier strike group isn't meant to be stealthy. Quite the opposite. It is the ultimate tool for power projection and making a statement. If it is moving to a new region it will do so with horns blaring.

Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on the sea?

Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km detection ranges against fighter sized targets.

A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could cover entire conflict zones.

And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.

It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.

In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.

It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.

> It’s like trying to find someone you see in a street view image from a maps provider.

Are we talking about Strava, or satellites? It's not obvious to me that exercise data is any more real time or easy to find than satellite tracking.

> It does make me wonder how a warplane stops a merchant vessel without blowing it up if the radio doesn’t work.

Shots across the bows are a pretty universal signal.

Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.

For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather.

[0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution)

And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)

Someone with a computer sitting basically anywhere in the world could spoof it.

Obviously troops shouldn't be broadcasting their location regardless, but this particular leak isn't as impactful as the news is making it out to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS

Am I supposed to believe we live in a world where this exists, yet carriers are impossible to find and track on the sea?

Besides, modern fighter jets have radars with 400km detection ranges against fighter sized targets.

A dozen of them or more specialized sensor aircraft could cover entire conflict zones.

It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.

In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.

Oh. Duh, that’s a good point. The plane can shoot in Z-axes. Thanks.

And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)

And American carriers never operate alone, it's a whole Carrier Battle Group there.

The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.

A style of animated TV show from Japan

The battle group doesn't cruise around in formation, for specifically this reason.

A style of animated TV show from Japan

Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:

  As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the 
  waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink 
  satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold 
  crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without 
  the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times 
  story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security 
  risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, 
  that it is hard to believe.

https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...

It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades.

An aircraft carrier can be seen with the naked eye from 10 meters above the shore for about 28 miles.

Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?

Or is this article perhaps better interpreted as an example of a dangerous behavior that could be happening also during those sensitive times (in which case, it is unlikely that French media would be even running a story with a map of the sensitive location)?

If you can guess what shape the runner was going in, you could infer a lot of information from that squiggly line in the picture. You could determine the ship's course and speed.

How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?

Cruising speed of Charles de Gaulle is 27knots which would give the runner a pace of around 1:10mins/km depending on direction. That would really screw up your Strava stats

It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"

I recall something similar happened on US ships last year because of the Applewatch.

Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740

That's nothing, we also have this: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker

More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.

Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.

Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.

Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.

Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.

A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.

B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.

What's funny is I can imagine the sailor not understanding how the code works and properly setting up a "privacy zone" while at port to mask his location and verifying it was working while there

then of course while at sea, it's the same ship but different location

not like your home or workplace typically relocates itself

imagine being a coder at Strava trying to figure out how to deal with that, it's techically not possible

However it's a great marketing opportunity for Stryd footpod which can track distance without GPS

I wonder what a moving deck at even 10mph would do to a Stryd though

The GPS must have added 10mph? But it's all relative to the deck vs the sea, hmm

GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.

Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.

GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this

I occasionally see civilians on Strava doing the same thing, running laps around the deck of a cruise ship. The speeds and distances look ridiculous.

So I'm actually confused that in the little image of his run in the article it seems he's often making absolute progress in the opposite direction the ship is going for part of each lap. Like, was the ship going unusually slowly?

His pace was 4:38 over 7.2km and his track seems to backtrack at times so either the carrier was doing weird maneuvers or he is running faster than they are carrier.

I imagine they are in no rush to get closer to Lebanon. So maybe they are running in circles

Reminds me of Fitbit using heartrate to approximately guess calories used.

I'm told with a lengthy night on uppers can you can get your 24/hr burn up to the 7000-10000.

I seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier's presence in the Mediterranean sea.

We are not talking about stealth vehicles.

Seems we need a new digital category for Darwin Awards.

This is the modern way to die of stupidity — use your fitness watch app to log your miles on an online app instead of locally — so reveal your operational location.

The US had one of its secret bases in Afghanistan fully mapped for anyone to see by its residents logging their on-base runs.

Now, the French aircraft carrier is pinpointed en route to a war zone.

Local first is not just a cute quirk of geeks, it is a serious requirement.

Or not.

For facilities where this actually matters, controls are put in place to try and prevent that type of thing. You aren't actually allowed to bring an Apple Watch into a SCIF, and there are processes in place to try to screen to prevent you from doing that.

If there was a "secret base" that didn't screen for people bringing outside devices it's likely because they didn't think that someone listening in on the conversations happening inside the base, or being able to use external devices to locate the base was big enough of a threat to warrant the hassle of adding screening.

You can't actually implement app blacklists and packet inspections for a wireless device you don't control. And if you want to prohibit people from having and using devices you don't control in specific locations, you implement controls to prevent that from happening.

If you allow sailors or soldiers to have personal electronic devices in the first place, you've already accepted the risks they represent.

This really is a non issue.

For example, the fact that devices with wireless radios, microphones, and cameras with both hardware and software of unknown provenance are allowed on an aircraft carrier are much bigger security risks than the fact that the device was using an exercise tracking app. There's much, much, much, much more valuable information on an aircraft carrier that could be compromised by these devices than the boat's location (which is not really secret).

I'm willing to make a bet that the Captian of the Aircraft Carrier and the Admiral commanding the strike group prefer the fitness benefits their sailors get from having such devices / apps then they do from the security risks they represented.

If the risk was real enough... the devices wouldn't be allowed on the boat in the first place.

This just seems like people overreacting to what is really a non event.

> This is the modern way to die of stupidity

With how bad the human experiment generally is, I rejoice in the fact that our own stupidity will be our undoing. Imagine if we did things correctly.

Many questions:

I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?

Does the French military not stress in their training the dangers of these data disclosures?

Why does the carriers network not have adequate measures against this sort of data exfiltration?

Why is Le Monde tracking a french sailors location data?

Sure, but there's a big difference between using nation-state resources like spy satellites, and using a public API exposed by a fitness app.

Not everyone can use spy satellites, and even if we're only talking about nation-states, many (most?) countries do not have spy satellites.

Mediterranean maybe (although I'm not sure), but it's actually very hard to find a ship, even as large as an aircraft carrier, in the ocean. The empty space is just too big. Satellites have hard time taking pictures of every square mile of a sea to find any ship, yet alone the one you need.

We couldn’t find a commercial jet (MH370). Both, while it was still flying in the air and after it was presumably lost in the ocean. They couldn’t track it in the air nor can they still find its remains after looking for it for so long. This problem is not trivial.

Yeah id be more impressed if he found a submarine using strava

If they have ships in the area sure but picking it out of the ocean if you don't already know where it is on satellite data is a lot harder. Until the last decade or so satellite tracking of ships visually was essentially the domain of huge defense budgets like the US that had more continuous satellite coverage. It'd be interesting to see how well that could be done now with something like Planet and tracking it forwards in time from port visits or other known publicized pinpointing.

> seriously doubt there is a country on earth which lacks the capability to detect an aircraft carrier

They probably lack the ability to figure out which specialists are on board.

Maybe stupid question but how would Iran do it? They don’t have any ships in the area and also don’t have any satellites that could take pictures, right?

Or does getting told by Russia count?

Isn’t the point that if you can identify one naval vessel by this means you can probably identify many?

Why make it easier for them?

I think people tend to lack imagination about how some piece of intel could be used by an adversary.

If Charles de Gaulle turns off AIS, how does North Korea find it?

> I can assume Strava is GDPR compliant and would not publish this information without the sailors concent?

Historically there was a problem where user's data was aggregated into a global view. But these days you'd have to follow the user on Strava to get this sort of track.

I suspect that a journalist at Le Monde has a naval buddy on Strava and posted the story.

Are you aware of a policy that allows Strava when within sight of shore, but bans it when under more sensitive operation?

This isn't a novel problem.

Detailed maps of military and other sensitive areas have been created through run maps from fitness watches[0].