© EPA/JENS BUETTNER

TASS, 9 July. Popular mobile application for physical activity and sports the Polar Flow web service allows you to receive confidential information about the location of soldiers and employees of special services of the USA and other countries. This was announced on Monday, the website Bellingcat, whose staff conducted the investigation jointly with the Dutch newspaper Correspondent.

Thus, the Polar Flow app was the second application program for fitness, the application of which law enforcement officers could lead to leakage of confidential or secret data. Earlier this year, the American newspaper the Washington Post reported that social network for athletes, Strava allows you to locate military bases all over the planet.

Open data

The authors of the Bellingcat investigative journalism and Correspondent have revealed the identity of 6500 users of the fitness tracker, Polar Flow, worked on 200 secret facilities around the world . This program monitors the state of the body during sports activities, passed the open portal of information about the place where they hold their sessions, and user names. Data about customer location recorded using a global positioning system GPS, you can get in the open access online Polar Flow website. Additional information about the user can be obtained from other open sources on the Internet.

Among the users, which you can track with your fitness tracker, Polar Flow, according to the authors of the investigation, was the FBI and the national security Agency and a senior U.S. officer serving on a military base, where the deployment of nuclear weapons. Among the users, whose location can be tracked, the authors of the investigation found military pilots of the Western coalition, striking at the group “Islamic state” (IG banned in Russia), the us military, in a protected green zone in the Iraqi capital Baghdad and the Western military advisers in Afghanistan.

The application developer

The Finnish company Polar, the Polar Flow web developer, has published on its website a statement which said that the leaking of personal data via this app has not been. The company announced that it had suspended the functions of its program, allows you to obtain information about the user.

Polar recalls that the client can decide whether to make available their personal data for public access. She warned users that they should take care to disable this feature and not to disclose confidential information about their location.

Fitness as a threat to national security

In January, the Washington Post reported, some apps and a social network for athletes can detect the location of military bases. As an example, was called Strava, the social network, which is based in San Francisco and offers a GPS application for runners, cyclists, skiers, mountaineers and other sports enthusiasts.

20-year-old student from Australia Nathan rather at the interactive map Strava Global Heat Map checked, it is possible to know where in sports the American soldiers in Syria. Users of Twitter, following in the footsteps of Razer, found the Jogging routes around the proposed base of the CIA in Mogadishu (Somalia) and the location of anti-aircraft Patriot missile system in Yemen.