Don’t Let Strava Reveal Your Home Address
Strava makes it easy to share exercise routes not only with friends and family, but with the entire Strava community. While this feature is supposed to be completely anonymous, researchers have discovered a way to link your heatmap data to your home address. Strava has serious privacy issues.
How Strava accidentally reveals your home address
According to Bleeping Computer , researchers at NC State University in Raleigh have discovered a problem with Strava’s popular heatmap feature that could let interested parties know your home address.
The Strava Heatmap is supposed to help you find new trails or routes you might want to try in your next workout. Users upload their exercise routes anonymously, so their private heatmap is combined with the public heatmap without any identifying information. In theory, this should be a private and fun way to connect to the larger Strava community. But the researchers were able to crack the code.
The researchers began their investigation by collecting publicly available data from users in Arkansas, Ohio, and North Carolina. They were then able to identify start and stop points on the maps, which allowed them to associate certain places with houses. They then overlaid footage from OpenStreetMaps on top of heatmap data collected from those original three states, giving them a map of individual addresses.
The researchers took advantage of Strava’s search feature to find users who have associated themselves with a particular city while using the app, scraping their public data such as timestamps, distances, names, and even profile photos. They compared this data with the address map they created and found that they were able to correctly determine the user’s home address with an accuracy of approximately 37.5%. This number increases the more active the user is.
While most Strava users would not be able to discover their home address using this tactic, a large percentage would.
This is not the first time either. Back in 2018, analyst Nathan Ruser warned that Strava’s heat maps show the location of US military bases and the people stationed there . Even earlier, Strava users were frustrated by the app’s complicated security settings and couldn’t figure out how to share their workout data with friends and family while hiding it from outsiders.
How to hide your home address on Strava
Luckily, it’s not that hard to stop an app from sharing your home address. As Tom’s Guide points out , it’s best to hide the start and end points of any workout. This way you don’t load the heatmap with data that can be associated with a specific address. To do this, open the settings section in the Strava app, tap the settings gear, then select “Privacy Control”. Click “Change Map Visibility” where you can choose a radius to hide the start and end of your exercises (up to one mile). You can also hide these points from a specific address, which is handy if you want to hide your home address but still share your start and end points while exercising away from home.