Digital map tracking fitness can locate secret agents

A DIGITAL map has been broadcasting the whereabouts of Britain’s secret service agents including MI6, MI5 and GCHQ workers, the second incident of this kind to spark security concerns.

Polar – a Finnish fitness tracker company with offices in the UK and America – said it is “tweaking” its fitness tracking app, after researchers warned that it was possible to identify personnel at sensitive government locations and facilities, dating as far back as 2014.

An investigation by Dutch news site De Correspondent and website Bellingcat gathered names of agents at GCHQ in Cheltenham along with foreign equivalents.

Researchers found 6,400 users exercising at locations including MI6, the White House in the US and Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.

In one example, researchers identified an American soldier in Afghanistan by cross checking their Polar Flow profile name and picture with Linkedin.

Through the app, they could track runs across in several military bases across the Middle East as well as starting and finishing dozens of runs from a residence in New York.

A spokesman for Polar UK said that the company took “privacy very seriously”, adding that data mentioned in the article were marked public. It has disabled the map.

Polar describes itself as a “leader in heart rate sensors, training apps, wearable sports devices and activity trackers”. It most well known for producing cycling computers that rest on bike handlebars. The Polar Flow app has been downloaded by millions of Android and IOS users.

It comes months after Strava, a similar app, exposed the running routes of soldiers in the Middle East and Africa, potentially opening them up to attack from militants.

An SAS base in Hereford, along with a nuclear deterrent naval base and GCHQ could also be found on Strava’s heatmap, which showed the running routes of millions of its customers.