How to Prevent Strava From Telling Everyone Where You Live
Separating your running and cycling routes is the whole point of using Strava: you can see if you’re the fastest in your area when climbing that big hill, or pick a friend’s favorite running route to see how you compare. But analyst Nathan Rousser noted this weekend that the app’s heatmap of popular routes shows, unfortunately, data about military bases and the people deployed there .
This is not just a military problem. Many of us don’t want random people to look at our running routes, especially when they’re near our home. Quartz reporter Rosie Spinks wrote last year about the difficulties she faced getting her Strava account banned . She thought her settings would hide her actions from outsiders, allowing her to share with friends, but Strava has several privacy settings that were hidden at the time, which meant that she could still be found through various features of the app.
Strava wrote this blog post after getting in touch with them listing all the ways to protect your privacy in the app. (We contacted Strava to ask if this information is current and complete. We’re still waiting for a response, but the app appears to behave as described.)
Strava’s privacy settings are getting pretty granular, but there are trade-offs
The bottom line is that you have to tweak a bunch of settings to get any kind of privacy, and some of them require compromises when you can’t use certain features of the app, like seeing where you stand compared to the fastest running people. a specific segment. When you sign up for Strava through the iPhone app, you won’t see any privacy-related settings. You just create an account, provide location access (without which it can’t track you at all), and then it prompts you to start a run or ride.
If you want to find your privacy settings, you need to go to the Profile or More screen, then Settings, and then Privacy. There you will find five different switches, each of which allows you to make certain types of things private. One, Private by default, requires you to agree to share each run, not the other way around. The other, Enhanced Privacy, allows only those you follow to see your photos, your last name, and your profile actions. But as Spinks found out, your name will still show up in other parts of the app. Here she has an updated guide to Strava’s privacy settings .
Hiding your home
Strava’s first privacy recommendation is to create “ privacy zones ” around your home, workplace, or anywhere you don’t want people to spy on you. (I also learned today that mountain bikers use privacy zones to hide their activity on illegal trails .) But these zones are a clumsy tool that doesn’t really make your whereabouts completely secret.
First, you need to go through the Strava website to set up your privacy zone, but you can follow the link from the app if you know where to find it. (It’s at the bottom of the privacy settings screen.) Then you need to enter an address and select a zone size. Your options range from a radius of 200 meters to one kilometer, which is 0.62 miles.
These distances can be convenient if you live in a densely populated area, but if you are on a country road, there may be only a few houses in your private area. Strava hides the portion of a ride or ride that starts or ends in the privacy zone, but that means your profile could end up with a bunch of short actions surrounding a two-kilometer dead zone. For example, see if you can guess where I set the center of my privacy zone here:
If you need more hints, Strava also shares photos I’ve taken at any time on the run, including the sign for the boathouse in North Park, which is the location I’ve set as the center of my blind spot. A stranger can also do simple math along just one of these routes to figure out how far down the road your home should be. This looks (and is) a non-stop course, with a clearly indicated mileage:
It turns out that privacy zones aren’t all that private.
As you might have guessed, the most private solution is to ditch the app altogether, or keep every run and ride confidential, making it useless as a social app. Other running apps don’t have the same public leaderboard system, but other types of sharing are allowed, including posting your run map to Facebook. This may seem simpler until you start wondering if you really trust all your 300 Facebook friends with your home location data. Your only option seems to be over-thinking about your privacy anyway, so good luck with that.