Trained, Disciplined, and Published Anyway
In October 2024, Le Monde found 26 United States agents, 12 French security officers, and 6 Russian ones running public fitness app accounts. From those accounts alone, reporters reconstructed the movements of the people they were guarding.
One agent's activity showed the San Francisco hotel where the President stayed for talks with China's leader in 2023, logged hours before he arrived. Another account placed a French president at a private weekend that had never appeared on any official schedule.
The official response belongs in the lesson, and it is worth reading one clause at a time. The Secret Service prohibits personal electronic devices while on duty during protective assignments. It does not prohibit an employee's personal use of social media off duty. And it assessed that the exposure caused no impact to protective operations and no threat to any protectee. Take that at face value. Note what it leaves standing: the accounts that published those routes were personal ones, used off duty, which the rule permits. The discipline on duty was intact. The record got published anyway.
Because the behavior was not the failure. The publication was. Nobody in that story was careless in the street. They were trained, and a schedule was assembled anyway, out of what got posted. Scopos says it in one sentence: planning an attack requires knowing where someone will be and when.
This Lesson Is Not About Where You Go
So notice what this lesson is not asking. It does not ask you to change where you go or when. School runs and standing meetings do not move. It asks whether you are also publishing them. And your own account is half the question. The other half is what the people around you publish from theirs.
Where
When
Who Else Posts It
The Frame Leaks More Than the File
On a photo, the bigger leak on a platform is usually what the frame shows. The street, the signage, the view out the window. The file's own location data matters most when you send a file directly to someone. Check what your apps and your files carry, and check again later, because these behaviors change without notice.
And nobody here is telling you to delete your accounts. That is not a serious instruction. Post what you like. Publish less of when, and less of where.
One habit does most of the work: move the post to after you are home. The same photo four days later still shows the place, the street, and the signage. What it no longer says is that you are standing there right now.