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One of the most embarrassing security goofs in recent memory started with soldiers going for a run.A GPS company called Strava Labs recently released what it calls the Global Heat Map, meant to be a neat visualization of where people exercise. Strava makes the GPS tech inside fitness trackers such as Fitbits and some smartphones, the stuff that makes it possible for you to track and map your runs and your bike rides. The map reveals the places where people track themselves the most.For the most part, the Heat Map is just interesting to look at. Near the Popular Mechanics office in New York, for example, you can see the white-hot jogging paths within Central Park and alongside the Hudson River. But if you look at places like Somalia, Syria, or Afghanistan, what you see is a few hotspots in a sea of data darkness. It doesn't take a super spy to figure out what's going on here. These are the exercise pathways of American soldiers, who are bound to be among the few people in these regions using U.S. GPS-tracking technology. Says Gizmodo:It’s clear from the pink paths that those people were, perhaps, running laps around an airfield in Somalia, a country where the US is sending more and more troops these days. But it’s not just Somalia. Online sleuths have discovered potentially sensitive US military sites in Afghanistan and Syria, along with sensitive Russian military sites in Ukraine, and a secret missile site in Taiwan. Make that formerly secret.Over the weekend, military analyst Nathan Ruser tweeted about the problem to raise the alarm about it. However, the Strava map has been online since November, making it very possible that foreign intelligence operatives have known about this oversight since then. And we're not just talking about the kind of aggregate data that could allow anyone to see the patterns of life on and around military bases. As the Guardian notes, it gets personal, too.While the heatmap only shows information in aggregate, Strava’s own website allows users to drill down into the tracked runs to find the names of individuals, as well as the dates they set their personal best times on particular runs.When applied to military bases, that information can be extremely sensitive. The leaderboard for one 600m stretch outside an airbase in Afghanistan, for instance, reveals the full names of more than 50 service members who were stationed there, and the date they ran that stretch. One of the runners set his personal best on 20 January this year, meaning he is almost certainly still stationed there.As for the fallout: Militaries are now considering whether and how they should ban their people from using this tech. Strava itself is digging in against the criticism, arguing that users made the information public when they uploaded it (in other words, it's your own fault for not reading the terms of service and taking them seriously). Update: Strava's CEO just released this statement pledging to work with military and government officials to fix this problem.