Laurie turned on Wikiloc tracking for a couple of days and shared her track with me. This post is to share what I learned. First it may help to re-read the Wikiloc article I posted earlier (in
post #2 above).
Don't have the Wikiloc App yet? Get it here! Are you following a track on your own or doing a race and want your friends and family to see where you are in rea
help.wikiloc.com
https://help.wikiloc.com/article/468-live-tracking
The article says that are a number of ways that a track sharing invitation can be made. I asked for it to be done by email. I ended up getting sent a simple email message that looked like this (I've changed the ID codes though):
Follow me Live at @Wikiloc!
www.wikiloc.com
A security concern with this though is the email was sent with Laurie's email account, not an email sent by Wikiloc on Laurie's behalf with her email address being anonymous.
The good news about this method though is that the person following the track does not need to have the Wikiloc app installed. I used two phones to test this, one with the app and one without. The phone with the app behaved the same as the one without the app. And that was that clicking the link brought up the default browser for the email app.
There were some problems zooming in to get to see the levels where buildings could be seen. The track shifted over some but was close enough to the road to know where it really was. This may have been due to my apps; I used my phone for everything.
Laurie noticed that she was being followed by four (or was it five?) but had only invited me. That is concerning but I suspect that Wikiloc is just counting the clicks on the link in the email and I had done that at least three times.
I had fun following the track but I only peeked three times. The first time was about 3:00 Portugal time, seven hours ahead of me. Besides seeing the green track she was following and her yellow track I was told her latitude and longitude and also that she hadn't moved in 45 minutes. I figured she had stopped for lunch or checked into an albergue for the day even though she had more green track to go. There were two rectangular buildings there, one labeled a chapel and an labeled one across the road. Not far away a truck stop has labelled as having lodging. So, a little mystery.
A couple hours later I saw that she had continued following the green track to a town but then diverged from it. I don't remember being given her location by coordinates but every twenty seconds the yellow track got longer.
With the next check I saw her at a lodging near a castle (later found to be more like the location of an old castle). The track wandered about the building before being terminated. A note said that her track had been saved to Wikiloc.com and there was a link. No coordinates were given but using the name in the lodging's label or examing maps for the town she was in (given in the basemap) or analyzing the data in the track at Wikiloc the location could be determined by coordinates if I wanted to call a missile strike on her. I used Google Maps to find the lodging by name (mystery three solved) and viewed photos of rooms there and explored the town. Then I used the Wikiloc app to view her track. Again, there was no coordinates given but they are there in the gps file if you know how to look. More fun here. Laurie added some photos and comments for some waypoints she added to her track. One at 2:14 showed her picture of a small chapel with a large portico making a long rectangular building and it the comment that the place was a good one to have lunch. Mystery one solved. For the next waypoint she mentioned that the track she was following went one way but she took the way that the arrows indicated (like she mentioned in a recent post). Mystery two solved.
I haven't yet tried Google Maps tracking to give a comparison between it and Wikiloc. If you are using Wikiloc to follow a track it may save some battery to let your people follow you by that app and avoid Google Maps too but I have to say that I really don't see much value in Wikiloc tracking. I really believe that the excess number of followers is a program design problem of using a simple algorithm and not a real security problem.
