The Column – Cyber Security Week
The Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier is not exactly a discreet object and certainly does not go unnoticed. It is a floating city with military ambitions, a mass of steel that by definition should be within a geometry of confidentiality, procedures, compartmentalizations, silences. Yet even there, on that bridge that was not created to accommodate spontaneity but discipline, an activity recorded on Strava, a fitness app, was enough to allow us to deduce its position in the Mediterranean. There is something almost comical, if it weren’t so instructive, in the idea that one of the symbolic platforms of contemporary military projection ends up narrated by an invigorating run by one of its officers.
The temptation, in these cases, is always the same: to treat the episode as an oversight, a stumble, an individual distraction. The problem is that distraction now has statistical tenacity. We are not faced with a mistake, but with perseverance in the error, which is a more evolved and more worrying form of stupidity, because it is not the first time. In 2018, Strava’s global heatmap made bases and routes visible in operational areas such as Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Even then everything was quite clear: the aggregate data, apparently harmless, become a flashlight aimed at what should remain in the shadows. You didn’t have to be a great strategist to understand that if you illuminate a routine long enough, the structure that supports it eventually appears.
And yet nothing. Or rather: nothing effective enough. In 2025, a survey of French sailors showed that Strava data allowed the reconstruction of elements relating to French nuclear submarines and the Île Longue base. Now, if there is an object that in the collective imagination should have an almost religious relationship with secrecy, it is the nuclear submarine. It’s literally a machine built not to be seen. Yet, even there, between crew training and interruptions to sporting activities, departures, returns and operational cycles could be inferred. Which produces a rather grotesque scene: we spend a fortune to make a strategic platform invisible and then we make it resurface with the kilometers of jogging.
The point, of course, isn’t Strava itself doing its thing. The point is us, or rather our stubborn inability to understand that data does not only speak when it shouts. A recurring route, a hotel, a detour, an interruption, a series of open profiles: taken one by one they seem like insignificant details; put together they become a map and this is precisely the most modern aspect of the problem. There is no need for the great leak of documents, the stolen dossier, the spy with the hat pulled down over his eyes. The seriality of habits is enough. Intelligence today often doesn’t break down the door: it passes through the window we left open to let in some air while jogging.
This was also seen outside the strictly military perimeter. In 2024, the activities of Macron’s bodyguards allowed the reconstruction of locations, hotels and preparatory trips. In 2025, Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s Strava security profiles made it possible to indirectly follow some of his movements. Here too the interesting fact is not the single imprudence, but the repetition of the script. We continue to behave as if the digital environment were a neutral backdrop. We move, record, share, synchronize, and in the meantime we tell ourselves that they are details of ordinary life, but the informative power is almost always found in the constancy of the detail.
Perhaps the real issue is older than apps and deeper than algorithms. We are a species built to recognize risk when it has teeth, claws, smell, mass. We are biologically rather good with a tiger hidden inside a bush and surprisingly mediocre with the digital trace that, drop by drop, reconstructs a base, an escort, a ship, an operational rhythm. It is very likely that before truly understanding that a tiger was dangerous, several generations of it ate it. With digital we are doing something similar, only with more graphic elegance and better heart rate statistics. We are not ignoring the danger: we are turning it into a habit and so it stops seeming like an alarm and turns into a lifestyle. The tiger, moreover, does not roar today: it synchronizes.
