Paddling is a team sport: why 'verified companions' beat a tag anyone can fake

In 2022, someone planted fake running 'segments' inside secret Israeli military bases on Strava and used them to expose around 100 people across at least six top-secret sites, including soldiers who had turned on the strongest privacy settings the app offered. The trick worked because of how these apps decide who you were with: not by asking you, but by who happened to be nearby.

On a big fitness app, you are grouped with strangers by default. Cover a 'segment' of road or water and you land on its public leaderboard next to everyone else who ever did, whether you know them or not. That is the mechanism the fake-segments operation abused: create a segment inside a base, and anyone who exercises there quietly joins the list. It is association by proximity, and you never opt into it. Strava has tightened some of this over the years, switching its nearby-users 'Flyby' feature off by default in 2020 after complaints that it felt predatory, but the basic model still puts you alongside people you never chose.

Paddling with people is one of the best parts of the sport, and it is genuinely social: you go out with friends, you keep an eye on each other on the water. But 'we paddled together' is a claim about another person. It should not be something an app decides for you, and not something you can pin on someone who was not there. A companion is a person who agrees they were with you, not a coincidence of GPS.

PaddleScout handles it the way you would in person: you ask. You can only tag someone you are already friends with, and when you tag them on a paddle it starts as a request. They accept or decline, and until they accept, nothing shows. A 'paddled with' on PaddleScout therefore means two people agreed it happened, not that your tracks brushed past a stranger's. No one can add themselves to your paddle, and no one can put you on theirs without your say-so. It is the same consent-first idea behind our private by default design, pointed at the people you paddle with.

The result is a companion list you can trust and a record of who was actually there. Paddling is a team sport, and the tag should need the whole team to agree.