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Strava Privacy Zones expand with new Edit Map Visibility functions

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Want to share your ride with friends? Strava is a great tool for that. Don’t want to share all your personal information with strangers? Strava is getting better for that as well.

strava privacy settings

Riders that weren’t keen on showing everyone exactly where they lived have already been making use of the Strava Privacy Zones. Now, those Privacy Zones get a new name with Edit Map Visibility, giving riders more control over their privacy settings.

Essentially, you’ll now have the ability to control the visibility of the entire map with three different ways to keep your location private. You can hide the first mile from the start/end of a specific location (same as the current setting), but now you can also hide the first mile of the start/end of a ride from any location for every ride, or you can completely hide the map of the entire activity. That last one will also hide it from the global heatmap or anywhere on Strava for that matter.

hide your location on strava

Note that hiding a specific address is also retroactive, applying to all activities past and future. The other two options will only apply to future uploads.

All of the new privacy features will be rolled out on August 18th, at which point an update of the app should make the features available to all users.

strava.com

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None Given
None Given
2 years ago

Okay, I use Strava every day, every ride. I use LiveTrack (Garmin) every ride. The thing they are ignoring here is that this is okay for YOU. However, if you invite some friends to ride from or to your home…well, there it is. I have shown this to friends over and over again.

To combat this Strava could “block” something as a “home”. I would bet that within one hour some joker would have the trail head (or what ever) as their home and block it – thus, running it for everyone.

In the end, pretending you are more secure in the modern world is a fallacy. If it makes you fell better, great. The reality is “they” are watching you, know where you are and by reading this message you will probably get an advertisement for a Garmin in your social media feed…..

Collin S
2 years ago
Reply to  None Given

I have a group of friends (a total of about 10-12) that we have been riding together for 15 plus years. Once privacy zones came to be, we all put a list together of the possible homes we start from and we all added them to our privacy list. It works 90% of the time. The issue is if someone who rides from there place. When they get to my house, they go up the driveway, and anyone who looks at their file, it would be pretty apparent someone lives there. If people drive to my house, then the privacy zones work. I’m not overly concerned but for some areas, there’s not a great way to get around this.

None Given
None Given
2 years ago
Reply to  Collin S

You are right, there is no “solution”. then again, I am not so sure what the “problem” is…this, like most things in the modern world is simply trying to appease someone who was triggered at some point by some thing…maybe someone. In the end. none of us in the US are “off the grid” and “un-findable”.

Collin S
2 years ago
Reply to  None Given

Agreed. It doesn’t bother me, but I can see the potential for it. Say you have a stalker on strava (If you have a decent amount of KOM’s, you may get followers who you may not know). Based upon past riding data, you can see were they live. Then that person posts a ride from their vacation, you know they are out of town and where they live, and that sketchy person could break in. I know that there were stories like this out in London or some other popular area like that. There was also a US pro rider who had his house broken into when away and stole a bunch of bikes and some life size Star Wars statues.

The biggest reason for the privacy zones was based upon the global heat map showed secret military’s bases in the middle of the middle east from service members who’d run on base and upload their files on strava.

Bas Simons
Bas Simons
2 years ago

great development, especially hiding beginning and end from any location

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