This is a common problem across militaries. It is difficult to stop soldiers from leaking their location if they have access to mobile phones and the Internet. Individual cases are usually a combination of naïveté, ignorance, and an unwillingness to be inconvenienced.

It still happens in Ukraine, where immediate risk to life and limb is much more severe than this case.

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sa46 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

About 15 years ago, our brigade conducted a training exercise to test overall readiness. The opposing force (OPFOR) figured out how to triangulate the brigade headquarters' position using Tinder.

Tinder provided 1-mile granularity, so OPFOR would roam around until they had enough points to locate the headquarters. Then, they'd artillery it out of existence. The brigade commander was most displeased—moving a brigade headquarters is not for the weak or fainthearted.

	▲	otikik a minute ago \| parent [-]
		They could have used grindr too for more datapoints.

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JJMcJ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There was fitness tracker that posted locations without user names.

Well, wouldn't you know, in Iraq there were all these square paths on the map. Yes, it was Americans jogging just inside the perimeter of small bases.

Just like with the aircraft carrier, these bases were not secret but it shows how locations can leak unexpectedly.

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FuriouslyAdrift 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It was FitBit and they got banned all over govt services because of it.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/08/06/...

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wrsh07 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It was also Strava, and it showed "popular running routes"

Example post https://www.reddit.com/r/running/comments/7tnzxy/stravas_hea...

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wvbdmp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, I would assume that the base, or in this case the carrier, is the only place where they would have the reception to broadcast their location, right? You probably don’t have cell service while out and about planting weapons on massacred civilians.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

Typically you'd record your run with GPS, no need for cell service, sync it to your devices occasionally and that's when it might be uploaded, or later.

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efitz 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

	▲	embedding-shape 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.
	▲	manquer 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important. Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified. We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.
	▲	Forgeties79 4 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default, so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt in most of the time

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amelius 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Different military but if those at the top of the chain of command can't even help themselves when it comes to secure communications (Signal app, cough) it's hard to blame soldiers.

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paganel 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with Ukraine, but only when it comes to the first two or so years of the war, by now most of those that didn’t respect those rules (I’m talking both sides) are either dead or missing some limbs. With that told, just recently the Russian MOD has started applying heavy penalties to its soldiers close to the frontlines who were still using Telegram and/or the Ukrainian mobile network (?!), so it looks like there are still some behaviors left to correct.

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matusp 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Another interesting development is the ridiculous amount of background bluring in photos. Turns out you can find surprisingly large number of garages, warehouses, treelines, etc based on a single photo.

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throwaway27448 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's also a morale issue. It's easier to get people to huddle in a cold and damp hole if they can play video games and watch anime.

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losvedir 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In my day, playing video games and watching anime didn't imply a network connection.

	▲	Wololooo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Boy, do I have news for you! But joking apart, almost everything is connected and calling home these days...

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alphawhisky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not a "cold, damp hole", it's called my basement, and there's also Dr. Pepper.

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GJim 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

anime?

	▲	barrucadu 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A style of animated TV show from Japan

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lava_pidgeon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

TG ist another case. This is more a crackdown on the uncensored internet. My guess Ukrainians are also using TG without problems.

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jmyeet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's this kind of incident that gives me faith that the military isn't hiding aliens and in fact pretty much any grand conspiracy that requires secrecy across a large group of people for long periods of time can pretty much be dismissed immediately.

One of my favorite examples are the soldiers who leaked classified information to win arguments on online forums [1]. Similar incidents have occurred with a Minecraft Discord [2].

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65354513

[2]: https://www.ign.com/articles/how-classified-pentagon-documen...