GasBuddy (and Life360) just sold that same location data to brokers, which Allstate bought and used to adjust premiums. Practically every app that is given access to location info is selling it, and it's widely available to anyone with the money to buy.

Maybe we should have some sort of General Data Protection Regulation law instead of hand-wringing about social media.

It’s not top secret deployments, it’s any deployments. All deployments need to maintain a level of operational security. Also if you expect a bunch of people in the 18-29 age range to go without internet for 9 months to 2 years, you’re kidding yourself. The tradeoff is between operational security and morale and if you’re in military leadership, you really don’t want unhappy troops on your hands.

Because consumer smartphones are a cheap and logistics-light way to improve morale on deployments.

It's not easy to put a McDonald's in the middle of the desert.

Generally, no. Specifically, yes.

https://news.usni.org/category/fleet-tracker

The more valuable signal from app data would likely be op tempo and what phase of a deployment / mission a ship is in.

Aside from inferred reasons for changes in patterns of behavior, one going emcon and suddenly dropping all users off an app means something.

Also, modern satellites are great, but even carrier battle groups are really small in the Pacific.

App usage not only leaks location, but number of troops; something which is not readily detectable by satellite.

The Onion Router was invented by the Navy to make ship location tracking hard with visibility of some of the network, so it's classified at times. More importantly, just because you have satellites doesn't mean that it's easy to pick all of that out all the time or to be entirely certain of which ship/which mission, etc. Making it harder is better even if it can't be made impossible outside of subs.

They almost certainly are while on deployment, despite it being really obvious where a ship is.