2023-06-14 19:26:08
Researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh (United States) have discovered that the global activity maps or heat maps of the Strava application are capable of reveal where the address of some users is located application assets.
Strava is a platform that has more than 30 types of activities with functions that help athletes explore, socialize and monitor their progress, as defined on its website.
This service has a global activity map or heat map, a feature introduced in 2018 that marks users’ physical activity anonymously. Thanks to it, they can find out which are the most traveled cycling routes or practicable trails, which allows them to improve brands or compare times with those registered by other users.
A group of researchers from North Carolina State University in Raleigh have discovered that, thanks to these heat maps, it is possible violate the privacy of these users and to know where your home is located, by knowing the place of beginning and end of the registered physical activity.
Specifically, in a document that explains how they reached this conclusion, the analysts indicate that it is possible to identify the address of some very active users of the application who reside in remote areas.
While it is true that these heat maps record activity anonymously, researchers have found that “in areas with few active users from Strava, the heat generated by an individual can be clearly visible.”
Homes can be discovered “effectively”
Therefore, the home addresses of individual users can be discover “effectively” based on user activity and the amount of heat that is generated in that city, as the signatories of this investigation have qualified.
To reach this conclusion, the data recorded for a whole month and publicly available through the Strava heat map, belonging to the states of Arkansas, Ohio and North Carolina, in the United States, were collected.
Image analysis was then carried out to detect physical activity start and end areas. In this way, it was possible to link the houses with the sources of activity, that is, with the users.
Once these data were confronted, the researchers created maps with various zoom levels using OpenStreetMapthanks to which the individual addresses of these residences could be identified.
Next, a section of the application was accessed that stored the location of users who had registered a specific city as their location; something that they might have unknowingly pointed out when downloading and configuring the platform.
Once this data was gathered and accessed to public data of these users, such as timestamps or distances traveled, they were able to make a filtering to discard matching profiles. Furthermore, their identities could be correlated with the location of their homes by extracting information from their accounts, such as real registration names and profile photos.
The greater the activity, the greater the probability of being identified
From this report, they also clarify that the users with the greatest probability of being located in a certain house were those who registered a increased physical activity in heat maps. This is because more information about them could be collected.
So much so that, after combining the data with the OpenStreetMap maps, the researchers point out that “with the threshold of 100 meters [de recorrido] and the publication of 308 activities, the chance of being discovered it is 37.5 percent.”
As a result of this investigation, Strava wanted to clarify in a statement sent to BleepingComputer that “does not track users or share data without their permission” and that heat maps don’t show that heat “unless multiple people have completed an activity in a given area.”
It has also recalled that any user of the platform who does not wish to contribute to these global activity maps can turn it off through data usage control.
However, it has said that it is “continually strengthening privacy tools” and offering more information to users about features to control their privacy experience.
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