The popular fitness app Strava has been found to have a privacy issue that could be used by an attacker or even a stalker to get the home addresses of its users.
Strava is not only one of the best running apps but it’s also one of the best workout apps overall. It allows runners and other fitness enthusiasts to track their heart rate, activity details, GPS location and more.
one of the best apps for running, but it is also one of the best apps for working out in general. It lets runners and other fitness enthusiasts keep track of their heart rate, details about their activities, where they are geographically, and more.
If it is not set up correctly, Strava’s heatmap feature, which is used by more than 100 million people worldwide, may present a significant threat to privacy. Intended to assist clients with tracking down new paths or exercise areas of interest, heatmap namelessly totals clients’ action so they can exercise in areas that are more secure because of the reality they’re more packed.
Presently however, scientists at North Carolina State College in Raleigh have found that Strava’s heatmap component could open up clueless clients to following by having their information on the stage de-anonymized.
Abusing Strava’s heatmap feature
In a new report (PDF), specialists at North Carolina State College have made sense of how they had the option to find the homes of competitors by utilizing Strava’s heatmap highlight. In its report on these findings, BleepingComputer emphasized the risks.
To begin, over the course of a month, the researchers gathered publicly available data from the heatmap on Strava in North Carolina, Ohio, and Arkansas. From here, they utilized picture examination to decide the beginning and stop regions close to roads to show that a particular home is connected to followed movement in Strava.
The researchers used heatmap screenshots that met their criteria to overlay OpenStreetMaps images at various zoom levels to identify individual residence addresses. After that, they did user crawling by using the Strava app’s search feature to find users who had registered a particular city as their location.
By contrasting the endpoints from Strava’s heatmap and individual information from the application’s hunt capability, the specialists were then ready to coordinate high action focuses on the heatmap with the places of residence of genuine clients.
This is due to the fact that a lot of public Strava profiles contain a lot of activity data with time stamps and distances, making it much simpler to find potential routes and match patterns in the heatmap data. In like manner, as numerous Strava clients register utilizing their genuine names and even transfer their photographs to the application, it is additionally conceivable to connect personalities with home areas.
However, the researchers went one step further and found that their predictions were approximately 37.5% accurate by combining their findings with data on voter registration.
The most effective method to remain safe while utilizing Strava to follow your exercises
On the off chance that you’re a Strava client that is worried about your own street number being found utilizing the means portrayed above, there are a couple of steps you can take right currently to remain safe.
First, you will need to hide your home address from Strava. This can be accomplished by activating the app’s option to hide the beginning and end of your activities. Navigate to the Settings section, select Privacy Controls by tapping the cog in the upper right corner. Here, you need to Alter map perceivability and you can modify the amount of the beginning or end of a movement is concealed up to a 1-mile range.
You can also choose to hide the beginning and end of activities from a specific address, such as your home, or to hide the beginning and end of all activities regardless of where they begin. If you want, you can even hide the entire map.
Some additional advice on how to stay safe while working out and track their progress:
“If you’re a runner who likes to keep a record of your routes online, think about how visible these maps are to strangers. Most runners are creatures of habits, and will run the same routes time and time again, making it easy for someone to build up a picture of where you might be heading. If you’re using Strava, you can either set your heatmaps to private, or hide the start and finish of your run, so it’s not clear where you live.
“On the run, if you’re worried you’re being followed, run into a shop, knock on someone’s front door, or flag down a car. When it comes to feeling safer on the run, your tech can be help: apps like Strava Beacon allows you to share your live location with up to three people, who can continue to track you until you stop your activity, LiveTrack and Incident Detection on the best Garmin running watches, and fall detection on the best Apple Watches are all designed to help runners feel safer.
“Your phone can also be used in an emergency — if you press and hold the right side button and one of the volume buttons on an iPhone 8 or later you’ll engage the phone’s Emergency SOS feature (on an iPhone 7 or earlier, rapidly press the top or side button five times). This will call the emergency services and text your emergency contacts. On a Samsung phone, hold and press the power button and tap Emergency Mode. We always hope we won’t need features like this, but it’s important to remind ourselves that they are there.”
You should limit the amount of personal information you post online, regardless of the fitness tracking app you use, just as you would with the best dating apps. Stalkers and even programmers frequently scratch freely accessible information to use in their assaults both on the web and disconnected which is the reason you need to play things near the chest to remain safe.
Since researchers were able to abuse Strava’s heatmap feature, the company probably will put in place more safeguards to keep its app users safe in the future.