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By Jack Beresford
Senior Reporter
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The location of an aircraft carrier being deployed toward Iran was inadvertently revealed by a sailor onboard using the popular sports tracking app Strava.
A report from newspaper Le Monde said that a French naval officer accidentally shared the near real-time location of the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier’s position in the Mediterranean Sea after using a connected smartwatch to log his latest run time on the app.
Why It Matters
The revelation comes at a fraught moment. President Emmanuel Macron ordered the deployment of France’s carrier strike group on March 3, only days after war broke out between Israel, the United States, and Iran. The Charles de Gaulle—initially engaged in NATO drills in the Baltic—was redirected through the Strait of Gibraltar three days later. While the task force’s presence in the region is not classified, the precise, real‑time positioning of its vessels is not something officials would want out in the public sphere, especially after Iranian strikes on French bases in Iraq killed one soldier and wounded six others.
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What To Know
Le Monde reported that, on March 13, a serviceman onboard the Charles de Gaulle uploaded his route and completion time for a 7-kilometer [4.4-mile] run around the deck of the ship on his Strava.
In doing so, he mistakenly broadcast the aircraft carrier’s real-time coordinates northwest of Cyprus, roughly 100 kilometers [62 miles] from the Turkish coast. His Strava account, which was set to public at the time, had exposed the movements of the flagship and its escort vessels.
Le Monde verified the location data, which aligned with satellite imagery captured just over an hour later. The imagery clearly showed the distinctive outline of the aircraft carrier.
Further investigations by the French news outlet highlighted earlier logs on the serviceman’s Strava account, which made tracking the French task force’s movements scarily simple.
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This is not the first instance of so-called "StravaLeaks" within the French administration. In 2025, Le Monde reported that crew members of France's nuclear submarines had inadvertently given away sensitive information about their positions and patrol schedules by sharing their workouts on the fitness app Strava.
It is not just a French issue either. A 2024 investigation by Le Monde also found that sensitive information was being uploaded to Strava that involved world leaders and their protection teams.
U.S. Secret Service agents, French presidential security officers and Russian Federal Protection Service members were publicly sharing workouts logged during or near their assignments. For example, Macron’s private trip to Honfleur in 2021 was deduced from a jogging route shared by one of his bodyguards. In another instance, a Secret Service agent’s jog revealed the San Francisco hotel where former President Joe Biden was staying before a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
What Are StravaLeaks?
StravaLeaks refers to a series of security breaches in which sensitive military or government‑related locations were unintentionally revealed through publicly shared fitness data on Strava.
Strava’s core function is to map users’ runs, rides, and workouts. By default, activities are public unless users manually change their privacy settings. Even when an activity is set to private, Strava still aggregates anonymized data into features like its Global Heatmap, which shows billions of GPS traces.
Because Strava is widely used among soldiers, security agents, and government personnel, their routine exercise routes were embedded into these global maps, often without their awareness.
The first major incident occurred in 2018, when researchers noticed glowing exercise routes in remote deserts on Strava’s Global Heatmap—areas with no civilian presence. These turned out to be U.S. and allied military bases in Syria, Afghanistan, and Djibouti.
What Are People Saying
Reacting to this latest instance of StravaLeaks, French military officials told Le Monde that the serviceman’s post "does not comply with current regulations" and that service members are repeatedly reminded of "digital hygiene," especially before deployment. The officials added that disciplinary measures would follow.
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