Even the inactive locations can still reveal a lot of data about the visitors and their networks.īelow are examples of a location page and a user’s venue history. Some locations currently have a lot of active users while other locations were briefly used years ago, such as Blackwater / XE’s location in North Carolina. Yet sensitive locations such as military bases can easily have hundreds of unique visitors, and beyond Europe, North America, and the Middle East, military users can be found at locations as varied as Greenland, Niger, and South Korea. Their profiles and the pictures they post also reveal family, friends, and colleagues.įor reasons explained further below, it is difficult to assess the total number of individuals that can be traced this way. Air Force are included as well.Ĭross-referencing these check-ins with other social media makes it easy to find these individuals’ homes. drone pilot, along with a list of both domestic and overseas military bases he has visited, a naval officer, who checked in at the beach next to Guantanamo’s bay detention center as well as several times at the Pentagon, and a senior intelligence officer with over seven thousand check-ins, domestic and abroad.

These locations are neatly sorted in over 900 categories, which can be as diverse and specific as “botanic garden.” “strip club,” “gay bar,” “west-Ukrainian restaurant,” and “airport gate.” As the result of this, the app allows anyone to trace the movements of other users between sensitive locations - as well as their favorite bars, hotels, restaurants, neighbourhoods, and, sometimes, even private residences.Įxamples of users that can be tracked this way include a U.S. But Untappd users log hundreds, often thousands of time-stamped location data points. The social network has over eight million mostly European and North American users, and its features allow researchers to uncover sensitive information about said users at military and intelligence locations around the world.įor people in the military, neither drinking beer nor using social media is newsworthy on its own. Surprise! The beer-rating app Untappd can be used to track the location history of military personnel.

Beer untappd