Breaking down Strava’s “simpler, clearer” privacy controls

It’s time to check your Strava privacy settings. They’ve had a bit of an overhaul and in the company’s own words, they’re now “clearer and easier to use.”

Last week we reported on a cyclist who suffered the theft of five bikes who expressed his belief that thieves were looking for quick times on Strava to try and find high-end bikes. He urged users to check their privacy settings and being as these have changed this week, it seems an appropriate time to revisit the topic.

Users now get to select who sees their data for four different aspects of Strava.

All of these options are accessible via the website or the app.

1.Your profile page

Your profile page displays information about you, such as your name, activities, followers, photos and stats. You can choose for the information to be accessible by everyone or just by your followers. Select the latter option and non-followers will only see limited details, much of which will no longer be clickable. The easiest way to work what will and won’t be visible is to seek out the profile page of someone you don’t follow and take a look for yourself.

2.Your activities

Activities are the workouts, races and events you record and upload to Strava, excluding group activities. You can set them to be visible to (a) everyone, (b) your followers, or (c) only you.

An important point to note is that if you alter this setting, the new default will only apply to future activities. All your old ones will still be public (or private, if that’s what the old setting was). (What do you mean you’re not up for going through five years of activities, tweaking the privacy options for every single one?)

Another somewhat less important point to note is that you can only appear on Strava segment leaderboards if your rides are visible to everyone.

You can also override your default privacy settings for any given ride within the activity itself.

3.Group activities

Same as above, only you can’t make them visible only by you. The ‘who can see’ option gives you a choice between everyone and your followers.

4.Flyby

You might not even know about flybys. Flybys allow you to watch a map-based play-through of your activity, minute by minute. It shows other athletes who were nearby and where you crossed paths. You’ve a straight choice between being visible on flybys or not.

Additional controls

These include the option to set up privacy zones and also a tick box to say whether or not you want your data included in Metro and Heatmap data.

Metro data is being used by town planners and advocacy groups to show where people run and cycle in cities. Heatmap puts the same data on an interactive map.

Privacy zones hide the portion of any past or future activity that starts or ends within them. The idea is that the exact location of your home (and bike) cannot be seen on the map of your ride – although Wandera has pointed out a flaw with this which as far as we’re aware still hasn’t been addressed. (Update: Turns out it has been addressed. Privacy zones are no longer exactly centred on the address you put in. There's an option to regenerate the zone if you want.)

If you’re at all concerned, you might want to think about manually starting and ending your Strava recordings a little way from home or just setting your rides to be visible only by you.