Norway: Soldiers' location history found in data sold by Tamoco (opens in new tab)

There were also armchair people wondering about other tracks in various places in the world.

I have ones around my home and where I work. No idea if that affects whatever data they sell (I doubt it, since you can still the full activity yourself even with a privacy zone), but stops people finding where you live/work and nicking your bike

Strava publish a "heat map" that shows aggregated activity of all their users. It's useful for finding common running/biking routes in areas you don't know well. That's how the military bases were found.

https://www.strava.com/heatmap#7.00/-120.90000/38.36000/hot/...

EDIT: I forgot that Strava do sell heatmap data to government transportation departments and such so I fixed the comment.

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EDIT:

I also think it's important to contextualize this journalism with the current debate around the Norwegian contact tracing application.

The application has been heavily criticized for the collection of GPS data for research usage and track behaviour when new guidelines are announced. They claim this data is going to be "anonymized", but alter clarified it would only be "pseudonomized".

It is also unclear if the data collected is going to be deleted in December, when the app is set for deletion by the current regulation from Stortinget.

Back when Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, I wonder what would have happened if rather than a whistleblowers we would have people buying data collected from soldiers smartphones in order to reconstruct the material. It should be pretty easy to identify colaborators by which smartphone gets into contact with someones else smartphone thus reconstruct who is working with who.

A lot of British intelligence during WW2 was gleamed not from the contents of the messages they intercepted, but rather from tracking who was where and communicating with whom.

And if you stop soldiers from using mobile phones on restricted ground, you are just going to have lots of tracks stopping abruptly at the gates and secure facilities identifiable by their lack of emissions.

Patterns.

There have been great examples of correctly identifying the crews of nuclear submarines by their predictable periods of time offline.