To track their personal fitness while deployed?
My imagination of how an army is run requires careful maintenance of fitness of soldiers, so use of PT instructors, regular monitoring of fitness metrics. It also has dieticians to monitor food production/intake. Opsec would probably deny any personal electronic devices.
If a deployed soldier needs to track their personal fitness then that suggests a deficiency - fitness of sisters must be of prime importance during deployment? There seems no reason that soldiers wouldn't have a fitness record they could access that included all food intake, mandated exercise, regular weight monitoring, blood pressure, and whatever.
Of course, the use of personal fitness devices suggests my conception is wildly off how a deployed corpus of soldiers is actually run.
When deployed operationally fitness is usually your own business. PTIs often have a different job operationally (something like close protection of the commanding officer), although they may provide some mentorship and help improvise fitness equipment.
Generally soldiers are treated like professionals and left to manage their own fitness when deployed, using the skills and self discipline they've been taught. A fitness monitor is a good way to do that.
> Opsec would probably deny any personal electronic devices.
It doesn't. I've been told to not connect to Afghan mobile networks, and obviously not to talk about what you are doing, but apart from that you can just use your common sense.
> Of course, the use of personal fitness devices suggests my conception is wildly off how a deployed corpus of soldiers is actually run.
It's probably far more chilled out than you imagine. In my experience tech people think the Army is all 'sir-yes-sir'. I've literally never said that in my entire life in the military.
Check the FB group Fill Your Boots for what Army catering is really like... Nutrition seems to be very, very far down the list of priorities.
Soldiers generally lose a lot of fitness while deployed, manning an observation point or a weapons emplacement just doesn’t involve much movement, only a small minority are out on foot patrolling every day.
The problem isn't just the soldiers and it's not just Strava, it's the culture around data itself. Tech companies that produce quantified-self devices or services need to realize the ENORMOUS responsibility they're taking on by collecting and using this data. Users need to realize just what it is they are sharing and how their data gets from point A to point D. Burying it in the fine print is not enough. Maybe people should get into the habit of looking at the data profiles each company has on them or at least being aware of the totality of what's collected so they can make better decisions. It is kind of ironic that the point of collecting this data is to help people make better decisions while this particular case is actually a collection of really bad decisions. Fire is both a useful tool and a dangerous chemical reaction, this is no different.
Perhaps there needs to ALWAYS be an option to route the data to a private server of the user's choosing instead. If that were standard practice, it probably could have prevented this problem.
I guess people could also be using their smartphone app, which I am less familiar with. If I'm misunderstanding what the source of the data is I apologize.