Check Your Privacy Settings: Bodyguards’ Fitness Apps Used to Track Swedish Leaders’ Travel, Private Residences

Bodyguards for Sweden’s royal family and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson uploaded their workout routes to Strava, a fitness app, according to an investigation by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

The app encourages its 150 million users—primarily runners and cyclists—to map and share their movements and popular routes to build a sense of community and friendly competition. Bodyguards and executive protection agents typically need to stay fit to do their jobs effectively. But the use of fitness trackers and workout apps can inadvertently put security teams’ principals at risk.

Dagens Nyheter reporters tracked more than 1,400 workouts by seven bodyguards during the past year, finding that the guards trained in the Alps, along Ukraine’s border with Poland, and at a military base in Mali. Some of the data was linked to Swedish Secret Service employees. The data revealed politicians’ travel, private meetings, and private residence locations, potentially compromising operational security.

Posts from a bodyguard assigned to the royal family “revealed how to pass through the Drottningholm Palace, the king and queen’s permanent residence outside of Stockholm,” The New York Times reported.

Sweden’s security police are investigating the publicized data's effect, emphasizing that there has not been a leak of user data—instead, the information was voluntarily shared by users who did not fully leverage Strava's privacy settings.

The fitness app has raised national security concerns before. In 2018, the U.S. Pentagon banned the use of GPS software on smartphones, watches, fitness bands, and other devices in combat zones.

“These geolocation capabilities can expose personal information, locations, routines and numbers of [U.S. Department of Defense] personnel, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission,” according to a Pentagon memo.

In 2023, a Russian submarine commander who shared his workouts on Strava was killed while on a run.

Sweden is not the only nation with executive protection concerns around the app. In 2024, French newspaper Le Monde published a similar investigative series to show how the app could be used to track a variety of world leaders and military operations.

“The military, the bodyguards of the world's most prominent leaders, and members of the intelligence services, who are supposed to be well-versed in discretion, can’t help but share their sporting exploits with the world on the social media app Strava,” Le Monde reported at the time. “An investigation by Le Monde reveals that men charged with protecting Emmanuel Macron, several U.S. presidents, and Vladimir Putin can be identified through their use of the sports-tracking app, endangering their mission and the lives of those they protect.”