Data Ready for AI Anywhere – Knowledge Still Protected

Figure 1. Strava’s global heatmap. Every trace on it was permitted on its own, and together they drew a perimeter nobody meant to publish. In January 2018, a twenty-year-old Australian student named Nathan Ruser was browsing a heatmap Strava had just published, built from roughly 13 trillion GPS points logged by people out running and cycling. Out in the Syrian desert, he noticed running routes glowing in the dark. They belonged to soldiers. In places where nearly the only Strava users were visiting personnel, the map quietly traced the perimeters of forward operating bases, the supply roads between them and the patrol routes in and out. Militaries spent the following week rewriting policy. Nobody had leaked anything, because every upload was a jog, permitted and unremarkable on its own. Nobody approved a map of base perimeters either, and nobody could have, because it did not exist until the individual runs were joined together. The risk is not access. It is inference. Enterprises are about to run…