Strava app shows your name, pic, info to nearby runners unless you disable this | Hacker News Reader

Strava app shows your name, pic, info to nearby runners unless you disable this

bleepingcomputer.com

18 pointsaxsharma8 comments

To be clear, you have to be running "with" (determined by algorithm) another person to be tagged. It doesn't tag every person that you cross paths with.

Strava's unique selling point is that it is primarily a social app, and secondarily a running app. Global leaderboards require users to make their activities public. So having privacy issues is par for the course.

The algorithm has a very loose definition of "with" if this Twitter user's story is accurate: https://mobile.twitter.com/MrAndrew/status/13055302761274286...

Their algorithm matched me with someone else who rode the same bike path as me but started her ride 8 minutes later. I can see her path and everything. It's creepy as hell. some random lady can look at my route and figure out where I live (based on her map, I think she drove to her start point so the address sharing isn't bidirectional)

I am all for privacy to a degree that inconveniences me often. However, I can’t help but think that I can go to anyone’s house and instantly know where they live if I’m not that picky on who I find. What difference is there between that scenario and one where you additionally have an arbitrary (and fairly sparse) account associated? The best I could guess would be if an expensive bike is listed? It seems there are more efficient ways to find bikes to steal. Honest question.

My bike is a piece of crap so I'm not too worried about that. I think it's more likely to enable stalkers and road rage.

e.g. a situation where someone is too anxious to ask for that cute jogger's number so they wait outside her house to chat her up the next day

Or I ask someone doing squats in the middle of the bike path to move out of the way, and then they get mad and murder me in my sleep.

Those are both definitely low probability events, but I think that users should be able to make an informed decision before their personal data is shared with strangers

Strava has a privacy zone feature that everyone should enable:

https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000173384-Pr...

Reminds me of when Strava routes were disclosing info about personnel & physical structures of military bases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

I haven't used it, but if the company is so set on opt-out versus opt-in, maybe it'd be preferable to default to 1st or 2nd degree connections only for location sharing. For the fly-By functionality where it's supposed to be public, it seems a little reckless to disclose name, picture, and location by default. I can also definitely think of other popular apps that do this.

They disabled or hobbled several useful features in response to soldiers sharing their location with a location sharing app. Maybe they were idealistic in assuming people who used the app wanted its functionality, but reckless does not describe the situation accurately.

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