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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is opt in, set your profile to private and you won't show up here or on leaderboards.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-Pr...

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