A run a day won’t keep the hacker away: privacy in sports apps often subpar

The circle shows the ’privacy zone’ that a sportsperson can designat
The circle shows the ’privacy zone’ that a sportsperson can designate. But this is on a street map, which shows where the sportsperson enters that zone. Combine that with the fact that you also know how much distance the sportsperson has covered, for multiple running activities (orange, green and blue), and you can easily arrive at 1 concrete point where the sportsperson probably lives or works.

Sports and fitness apps, such as Strava, are gaining in popularity year after year. They have also often become true social networks. You share some very personal data there, and sometimes unknowingly your home or work location as the starting point for your sports activities too. Apps usually allow you to hide those locations, but researchers from the imec-DistriNet research group at KU Leuven discovered that, in many cases, this option gives a false sense of security. The findings were presented today at the leading ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Los Angeles , and Strava has already invited the researchers to review their conclusions together.

The popular sports app Strava had more than 100 million users in 195 countries at the end of May 2022. ...

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