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Reacting to an investigation published Sunday, the company Polar has announced the deactivation of locator functions on its application.
Run, you are on file. Polar Flow physical activity application has disabled its location functions after researchers discovered that it can reveal sensitive data on soldiers and intelligence services in 69 countries.
Security researchers The Netherlands reported on Sunday (July 8th) that they had access to data on 6,000 people from a dozen different nationalities, including soldiers and members of the FBI and NSA. "With just a few clicks, a senior officer can be found jogging in a known nuclear weapons base." Foeke Postma said in a blog post following a survey published on the Dutch news site De Correspondent (in English) .
Met deze fitness-app kan iedereen from namen en adressen achteren van duizenden militairen en geheim agenten https://t.co/DbE3FuBiCu #ProjectPolar pic.twitter.com/gXpZGbubqh
– From Correspondent (@decorrespondent) 9 July 2018
"You can find soldiers from Western countries in Afghanistan using the Polar Flow app Cross the name and profile picture with those used on social networks allowed to confirm the identity of soldiers or officers " he adds. Sensitive information such as the personal addresses of submarine users, Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad and Russian soldiers in Crimea were also revealed, the researchers say.
Polar indicated that it was removing the function of the application allowing its users to exchange data, indicating however that they were in the public domain only because the users had chosen to share them. "It is important to understand that Polar provided no data without the permission of its users and that there was no violation of personal data" states the Finnish company. According to De Correspondent, only 2% of Polar users have chosen to share their data but this is enough to obtain sensitive information.
This case comes after another similar case, this time involving the application Strava, for which the Pentagon had revised the rules of use in January, because it allowed to reveal the military movements on the American bases in the world.
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