Le Monde detects 262-meter warship using satellite imagery guided by fitness app data
A French naval officer has revealed the location of the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier while using a smartwatch and a fitness app to track his running activity, according to Le Monde.
President Emmanuel Macron deployed France’s only aircraft carrier to Cyprus in response to the US-Israeli war against Iran, in which Tehran has targeted Western military assets in retaliatory strikes.
Le Monde reported on Friday that it was able to identify the approximate real-time position of the 262-meter warship through publicly available data from the Strava platform. By analyzing geolocation data from the young sailor’s public profile, the newspaper matched it to a satellite image from the European Space Agency, which showed Charles de Gaulle and his accompanying strike group about 100 km off the coast of Turkiye.
The report said that the jogging path recorded on March 13 appeared to be a zigzag pattern, suggesting that the person was jogging on the deck of a moving ship, although the specific ship was not directly identified.
French sailor reveals aircraft carrier’s position with his fitness app. Tracking app Strava shows the Charles de Gaulle as it steams across the Med. pic.twitter.com/wAQ6kqrQRo
– alexandrussy4 (@alexandrussy4) 19 March 2026
Security concerns regarding fitness apps and military personnel have been raised for years, especially during overseas deployments. Strava, a San Francisco-based service launched in 2009, updated its privacy controls following a 2018 report that found its ‘global heatmap’ visualization feature inadvertently mapped several Western military installations.
The French Armed Forces General Staff described the latest case as a violation of operational security rules and said it had identified several service members who shared location data or images from naval missions online, Le Monde reports.
Read more:
‘Not our war’: How the world has reacted to Trump’s call to patrol the Strait of Hormuz
While France has not joined the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran or committed its naval forces to carry out missions in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blocked, it has nevertheless been affected by the hostilities.
Drone attacks by Iranian-allied forces have been reported on at least two French military facilities in the Middle East, including in Iraq where one French soldier was killed and six others were injured.
