Every attribute of a Data point is critical for privacy
A fitness app revealed the secret military bases around the world
Strava a popular Fitness tracking app got into headlines in 2018 for putting out a publicly accessible heat-map of their users, which upon careful examining could potentially leak information about the secret military base around the globe.
I know many of you might be thinking — Like what??
Yeah, with the growing trend of data analytics has posed more threat what could be publicly exposed. Data analytics has shown that if one infers data in the right way he can get unexpected trends and results.
Anyone wearing a fitness tracker with the Strava app installed can make their location data public through the app. Strava put is user’s data as a global heat map open to public, they didn’t know what was going hit them.
People could interpret and find some remote places in the global heat map, turns out that these remote places with high physical activities of users in a fixed running track are secret military bases around the world.
This would be clearly due to the underestimation of the attributes of the data points that the Strava app has put out publicly. I hope this serves as an example to explain the diligence required pertaining to the data security and data protection topic.
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