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Europe|Bodyguards Using Fitness App Revealed Locations of Swedish Leaders
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/world/europe/strava-sweden-bodyguards-prime-minister.html
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Secret meetings and private holidays of the royal family and prime minister were inadvertently made public on Strava, which has raised security concerns in other instances.
July 11, 2025, 10:12 a.m. ET
Trying to keep fit with runs through Central Park, a jog around a tropical island and a bicycle ride around Stockholm, bodyguards in Sweden inadvertently revealed the secret locations of the Swedish leaders they were assigned to protect.
An investigation by a Swedish newspaper revealed that bodyguards for Sweden’s royal family and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson uploaded their workout routes to Strava, a fitness app that allows users to map and share their movements. The popular app has built a global social media community, but its users’ enthusiastic uploads have also raised questions about data privacy, especially among security and military personnel.
In Sweden, the data reveal added to the security concerns of a country that was recently rattled by what it called an “act of sabotage” against an undersea cable. This week, the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that it tracked more than 1,400 workouts by seven bodyguards over the last year. The data showed that the bodyguards trained in the Alps, along Ukraine’s border with Poland and at a military base in Mali. Sweden’s security police confirmed that the data was linked to some employees of the secret service.
Their routes gave away the address of the prime minister’s private residence, as well as the location of a personal trip he took with his wife in October of last year. Mr. Kristersson is also an avid runner, and while he had avoided sharing his routes, his bodyguards’ data made it easy to track his preferred path.
The Strava data also revealed a high-level meeting in Norway last June, unannounced at the time, between Mr. Kristersson and the leaders of Norway and Finland, and the locations and routines of other senior Swedish politicians, including two former prime ministers. The Prime Minister’s office said it would not comment on security matters.
The locations of Sweden’s royal family and the leader of Sweden’s opposition were also compromised.
A bodyguard’s run along a beachfront in Tel Aviv was matched to an unannounced visit to Israel by Jimmie Akesson, the leader of Sweden’s far-right party, the Sweden Democrats. (The party did not respond to a request for comment.)
