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In some cases where the data is sparse, you can find where individual people live, because the trails sometimes lead back to a starting point. Like this person

• dalemyers 9y ago
  It means that you can reliably predict where someone is gong to be, and for many people, that's a huge safety concern.
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    So one of the reasons they publish the heat map is that it is a great tool for trail and route discovery. Look at an area where you haven't been before and activities pop right out. Many Strava users are using it this way. So the concerns of people that need privacy are being balanced against that. Are the 2 options of either not using the activity tracking app or activitating the privacy setting not sufficient for people with safety concerns regarding their location?
    • givinguflac 9y ago
      Strava could easily make this opt in, or they could filter spots where there are only a few people using it. There are a ton of in between options, this data is not a yes or no scenario.
      • acdha 9y ago
        That seems like the best option: multiple users whose activity patterns aren’t highly similar (i.e. couples who run together) and blur start / end points which aren’t used by many people at different times.
        • killa_kyle 9y ago
          Strava already has an option to mask your starting location. It tracks it from your house, but the public data hides a certain radius around your start and finish locations
          • acdha 9y ago
            The problem is that it’s not available in the mobile apps and fairly well hidden on the website. For a big public data dump it seems like a reasonable precaution to assume many users aren’t aware of that feature.
          • ramparrt 9y ago
            I already use this feature but I can reliably find my driveway on the heatmap so either a) they aggregate everything into the heatmap regardless of the privacy sphere or b) it's from my friends visiting, picking me up, etc. Either way, there's a very clear route that leaves the road at my house and follows my driveway. It doesn't take much effort to find many, many more examples of this throughout the heatmap.
      • TrickyRick 9y ago
        It is opt in, set your profile to private and you won't show up here or on leaderboards.
        • maxerickson 9y ago
          They want the UX to be opt in. Or more opt in anyway, that the data ends up on a server is reasonably clear, so just using Strava involves a fair amount of opting in to begin with. I don't think I have strong feelings about it. I can see the point of something as severe as a data protection law that would require the app to explicitly ask for permission to share every activity (with options like "store to cloud" and "store to cloud, share data publicly"). On the other hand I'm not really bothered by the "don't use Strava" method of opting out of their data collection.
    • nitrogen 9y ago
      Look at an area where you haven't been before and activities pop right out. Sometimes locals keep trails secret because having a ton of people on them would destroy them. I've been on both sides of that dilemma, but I don't think looking for trails on a heatmap is a good answer.
      • maxerickson 9y ago
        I think people frequently overestimate how secret their secrets are. I also wonder why they would share the trails they want to keep secret on the social network for athletes........ Anyway, Strava advertises using the heatmap that way so go tell them you don't like it.
    • gregmac 9y ago
      An option not to publish tracking for an x km radius around your "home" location would probably work. It would also cover the military bases, since they could just pick 100km.
      • austinwm 9y ago
        This is actually an existing Strava feature called Privacy Zones[1]. It doesn't explicitly say that setting up a Privacy Zone will render activities which exist entirely within those zones private or that the Global Heatmap respects privacy zones but those are reasonable assumptions. [1] https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000173384-Privacy-Zones https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000173384-Pr...
  • bagacrap 9y ago
    how can you use the heatmap to predict timing?
    • tritium 9y ago
      You’d have to cache an available copy, wait for updated data, and then compare the two, to produce a diff. I’d imagine (or hope) there’s a process behind the scenes that slows down and selectively fragments the availability of new data, so that such diffs are too coarse to be revealing. Annual updates, staggered by decoupled groupings, being an ideal strategy. In general though, just knowing that an event has ever occurred thanks to the map, circadian rhythms often take care of the rest, since it’s a map of (mostly recreational) human activity.
• stctgion 9y ago
  There is an opinion to delay the recording start for this very reason
• miahi 9y ago
  Strava allows you to set places where it should not track (like close to home); not everybody uses that.
  • acdha 9y ago
    This isn’t in the iOS app at all. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that many users never visit the website.
    • rorykoehler 9y ago
      The iOS and Android apps are hamstrung versions of the web app. The web app is way more useful.
      • acdha 9y ago
        They’re also what 99% of their users use so they really meed to have feature parity on important things like privacy, especially given how trivial this would be (“fuzz n meters from my current location”).
        • steve_adams_86 9y ago
          Interestingly, this feature is one of the first I recall using on Android maybe 8 years ago. It was very visible and easy to turn on... Not sure why they made it harder to discover. Or have they removed it? They do offer manual route trimming from both ends, too. I've found this useful mostly when I forget to turn off my watch after running.
          • acdha 9y ago
            I’d believe it needed work after a major rewrite and is still in someone’s backlog. They seem to have a fairly small dev team - probably busy with device support & other time-sinks. I wish they had a way to do an auto-trim so my bike rides didn’t include GPS bounce leaving the building. CommuteMarker.com had auto-tagging for Strava rides but not auto-trimming last time I looked.
• walshemj 9y ago
  Presumably CIA MI5/6 Officers/Staff are told not to wear these sorts of devices as it could disclose there real word identity to an adversary.
  • rando444 9y ago
    All of the tracking done by strava and fitbit is all just built into your telephone, same as myfitnesspal and most of the other ones. Your options are not carrying a standard phone, or just not deliberately tracking yourself. These are not "always on" sorts of things, you have to enable them every time you want to be tracked.
    • darklajid 9y ago
      That's going a bit far. You can just opt out of the apps as well? I don't have either of those. I don't use Google Fit (or whatever that broken thing is called these days). True, my phone can track my position and steps etc. - but I made every effort to opt out of bullshit and to not opt in into worse things (aka .. Strava etc.). A phone is problematic these days. But I do believe that it mostly does what you want it to. People just love to share their lives online?
    • samstave 9y ago
      Hrm - I wonder why Apple or google have not yet been requested to build a government clearance only device yet?
      • fjsolwmv 9y ago
        They already exists. An enterprises user can configure a custom app store and ban the consumer app store.
      • jlgaddis 9y ago
        There are already mobile devices designed for the government (see the Obama Blackberry, for example). Also, like companies, the government uses (can use) MDM policies to enforce settings, restrict applications, etc., on iPhones, etc.
• milofeynman 9y ago
  There is an alley in my neighborhood where a single line is super dark and turns into a single house. I'm not sure how useful that is but I'd still rather not have that line if it were my house. https://i.imgur.com/R3j3jXA.png https://i.imgur.com/R3j3jXA.png I've found a couple of these nearby.
  • trimbo 9y ago
    > I'd still rather not have that line if it were my house. Why? It indicates someone lives in the house. Pretty safe assumption without Strava. The problem created by Strava (and other apps) is that people list their very expensive bike in their profile, then ride that bike to and from their house. Supposedly, thieves target users that way[1]. But the heat map does not provide that info, or link back to the rider/runner. [1] - http://road.cc/content/news/136239-police-warning-thieves-using-strava-target-expensive-bikes-wales http://road.cc/content/news/136239-police-warning-thieves-us... -- I'm not sure I buy the connection to using an app is causal.
    • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      I'd say people with a GPS fitness tracker are much more likely to have small fenceable items that drug users (who burgle to feed their habit) are usually looking for. If you're after a good car, then they're probably good marks too - crossmatch with low populationin density FTW.
      • notahacker 9y ago
        the flip side of that is that a GPS tracker is probably a better indicator still of "willingness to fight off an intruder or pursue an opportunist thieving items from a garden", especially in countries where normal people don't use firearms. Basic local knowledge probably gives you a better idea of which streets have the best cars - which are obviously usually visible when available to steal - and most fence-able items.
    • milofeynman 9y ago
      Sorry I wasn't clear, that line is filtered by BIKE on the map.
• dionidium 9y ago
  What have you actually learned? That somebody you don't know anything else about lives in that house? Presumably, you could have assumed that somebody you know nothing else about lives in that house. Somebody you don't know anything else about lives in every house. I actually share your intuition that this is somehow terribly revealing, but I think this is a broken intuition that needs to be updated for a more technological age.
• rmc 9y ago
  > Of course you could also just follow them IRL if you were there, so I'm not sure this is a big deal. Yes. But in that case, the person being followed can tell that they are being followed. A spy (MI6/CIA/etc) might be able to follow a target without being seen, but an jilted lover would probably not. So the victim is aware that they are being observed, and by who. In this case, the victim cannot see who is looking at the track, and cannot take evasive actions.
• tripzilch 9y ago
  That's ... honestly a bit disappointing. While I personally believe that the leaking of military location data is almost entirely the military's problem/fault, I feel that this could have been avoided with a minimal bit of forethought by the Strava team. It's not their job to protect military secrets or keep track if some of the data that's sent to them may be connected to a military secret or not. They are, however, responsible for the individual privacy of their own users/customers. I am reminded of the Dutch "first name database". It's a neat little website showing data (collected by the government/administrative/statistics dept). You can look up any first name in the Netherlands (17M ppl, FYI) and see how many people share this name. You can also see historical data how usage of the first name tracks through time. AND, this is the crucial bit, you can also see a nice heat map of the geographical distribution for this first name, per municipality. HOWEVER, and this is where it gets relevant to Strava. They simply won't show the geographical distribution heat map for names that are very rare. If a first name is not nationally rare, but it is in a certain municipality, they will also round it down to zero. Finally, if there's only 5 or less people in NL with that name they won't even show the full total (regardless of location). Strava could, and IMHO should have done that for regions where only a single (or just a few) individual accounts run a track.