It may not be your intention, but both this and the parent comment really misplace the blame.
The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base.
I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
News are terrible at that kind of writing. For instance with traffic incidents, it's always "a person getting hit by a car", not "a driver ramming their car into a person". So they write it like as if the driver had no agency, and the incident was completely non-avoidable and no one should stop to think about why it happened or how it can be prevented in the future. For good measurement they also use the word "accident" a lot.
Point was to show the two extremes, with news articles mostly using the passive one (which you call neutral but is far from neutral). So in practice never assigning blame to the driver no matter what, or even vaguely assigning the blame to the victim.
I don't think it's pedantic at all. I think we misplace the importance of how we communicate with each other and how we use our already limited languages (I mean, it's hard enough to communicate an idea in its purest form despite being articulate, the internet makes it harder, and not being concious about what you're saying just adds to the problems in the world imo)
Imagine if these companies did their best to hide the existence of secret military bases. They would need the location of secret military bases otherwise they cannot censor their public maps. The secret nature of the bases makes them impossible to not reveal.
The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base.
I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.