World Leaders’ Security Personnel Are on Strava ⇥ apnews.com

Sébastien Bourdon, Antoine Schirer, and Sinead McCausland, of Le Monde, are in the middle of a three-part investigation into how Strava compromises the travel activities of world leaders. It is paywalled, but two videos, in English, have been published on YouTube.

Sylvie Corbet, with an AP summary which, despite citing Le Monde, does not link back to the publication:

Le Monde found that some U.S. Secret Service agents use the Strava fitness app, including in recent weeks after two assassination attempts on Trump, in a video investigation released in French and in English. Strava is a fitness tracking app primarily used by runners and cyclists to record their activities and share their workouts with a community.

Le Monde also found Strava users among the security staff for French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one example, Le Monde traced the Strava movements of Macron’s bodyguards to determine that the French leader spent a weekend in the Normandy seaside resort of Honfleur in 2021. The trip was meant to be private and wasn’t listed on the president’s official agenda.

In statements from the GSPR and U.S. Secret Service, officials disputed the likelihood this is meaningfully harmful. World leaders’ trips are usually public information and, while there is minor risk in the advance disclosure of where the leader is staying, officials say there are enough layers of security. That seems right to me. What Le Monde identified is a theoretical concern, but it has not demonstrated an actual problem.

To illustrate: one example the journalists showed was a meeting between hopefully-just-one-time president Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un at a hotel in Singapore. The trip was public knowledge and announced a week before it occurred. Five days prior, however, a Secret Service agent was preparing the hotel for Trump’s arrival. Anyone monitoring this Secret Service agent’s activity might at most infer Trump would be travelling to Singapore, or perhaps that this agent is on holiday. Now, if Le Monde had found similar Strava activity from Singaporean police and North Korea’s Supreme Guard Command, that would be more notable. Small amounts of quasi-private information are rarely valuable, but the combination of several sources can be.

If this feels familiar, it is because Nathan Ruser and other researchers found secret military bases in 2018 using data from Strava. All these cases feel like a legacy of decisions made at a time when public social activity was seen as inherently good.