Some people here say an aircraft carrier can be seen from satellites so it's not a big deal. They miss a point (as I did too): this means you can identify individuals present on the carrier, so they become vulnerable to investigation and blackmail. Another country could threaten this individual's family to give some important information or worse (sabotage).

It would be cool if they actually wer just altering the GPS location data before uploading, so the location reported was false. GPX/TCX files are trivial to edit. "All warfare is based on deception"

It's been a problem for nearly 2 decades.

Think about it: suddenly, in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Niger/Djibouti a bunch of people start using a fitness tracker every morning (and the clusters show up in Strava). Did some village suddenly jump on the "get fit" bandwagon? Or could it be a bunch of US Marines/SpecOps/etc people trying to keep fit.

More than accurate enough to put an ASM in the right ballpark.

Modern militaries face some interesting challenges.

Possibly mobile apps should be designed to be somewhat secure for military use by defaul, backed by law.

Alternately, phones should have a military safe OS with vetted app store. Something like F-droid, or more on toto phone ubuntu, but tailored.

Obviously, you still need to be security conscious. But a system that is easy to reason about for mortals would not be a bad idea.

Rules like secure by default, and no telemetry or data exfiltration, (and no popups etc), wouldn't be the worst. Add in that you then have a market for people to actually engage with to make more secure apps, and

A) Military can then at least have something like a phone on them, sometimes. Which can be good for morale.

B) it improves civilian infrastructure reliability and resiliance as well.

Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:

  As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the 
  waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink 
  satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold 
  crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without 
  the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times 
  story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security 
  risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, 
  that it is hard to believe. 
  

https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...

If I were china I would buy strata and offer all features free of charge

All through this whole ghost fleet thing I've had this question as to how a large ship in the sea can possibly keep its movements secret. Large media organisations seem to be unable to say where large tankers have been if they turn their transponders off.

Don't we have constellations of satellites constantly imaging the entire earth, both with visual and synthetic aperture radar, with many offering their data freely to the public? Wouldn't a large ship on the ocean stick out somewhat? And yet journalists seem lost without vesselfinder. Is this harder than I'm imagining, or are they just not paying the right orgs for the info?

Those LeMonde guys are pretty sharp, it was on Twitcher only yesterday ... https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2034734061613129740

That's nothing, we also have this: https://github.com/BigBodyCobain/Shadowbroker