Strava - Heat Maps in the news

Looks like open source GPS tracking has its limitations

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42853072

I have few favorite "hidden spots" that I looked up when the Strava application came up a few months ago that appear to have escaped being revealed. I guess the folks who visit those locations either are technically skilled enough to turn off their open source tracking or the far more likely case being that we don't use the technology enabling us to leave electronic tracks (darn luddites )

Strava Heatmap Sequirty Risk?

Looks like more than secret bushwhack routes are at risk from Strava heatmaps.

Check out this article for the interesting specifics. (Look at the guys Twitter link.)

Who knew a Fitbit could be so informative?

cb

When we talked about this, pre security / news, I looked at the routes I often travel or wished to travel. Just this morning I looked at my street and the houses of the runners and cyclists have hot spots on their driveways.

It’s therefore quite obvious who is using it and who is not (or using it but with privacy turned on.)

Not that my home is a security risk at the national level or anything but it would certainly allow me to data mine local training partners.

Tim

Strava serves a narrow group of users (mostly runners). Sometimes attempts are made to use Strava heat maps to determine where "the majority of visitors" to an area go, but it is not a representative sample at all.

TCD said:

Strava serves a narrow group of users (mostly runners). Sometimes attempts are made to use Strava heat maps to determine where "the majority of visitors" to an area go, but it is not a representative sample at all.

Click to expand...

Based on my experience, only my super athlete friends use Strava (runners, triathletes, and bikers). They are definitely exceptional. That said, one could take some measurements to figure out what potion of people visit a given area, then come up with estimations of Strava users vs non-strava users to come up with adjusted values. When I was looking over the Whites, the heat map did seem to correspond pretty well with trail popularity, but using it for predictive analytics is another beast.

The majority may be runners, but if you look in the ADKs, you will see an awful lot of activity on places you typically do not see runners.

Ditto for the whites. There are some very interesting tracts on obvious bushwhack routes.

I wouldn't assert the majority of Strava users are runners. I believe it started out as a cycling app, but that's what I do, so I could be biased. It's what all my athlete friends do as well. I do know there was a collective cry of dismay when the 1,000,000,000th (one billionth) activity was a pool swim.

Using only the heat map, cycling and running are vastly brighter than swimming. Not sure one is brighter than the other, and typical cycling routes are probably longer than typical running routes.

Tim

I find strava heatmap very useful for verifying accuracy of hiking trails marked on OpenStreetMap. I also started printing sections of the map for use on my hikes.

Strava started out as a cycling app and I've been using it for that purpose for several years. Back then they had very limited support for hiking/running but I uploaded my hikes anyway. Feels like just recently (within the last couple of years) they exploded into other areas like swimming and running (a couple of my runner friends use it fevereshly to track all workouts and runs). I've put my hikes on it because it was convenient but back then I actually had to connect my GPS to my computer with a cable and upload a file. These days you just sync your smartwatch via BT and within minutes your activity is on Strava.

I've seen people here talk about bushwacks getting mapped on OpenStreetMap - this isn't all that different except that someone doesn't actively lay down a trail in an editor (like you have to for OSM), Strava does that. I don't understand why the world is going nuts about it, the original heat map has been around for years, this new updated one came out in November-ish? I have privacy zones set up for the places I visit often and whenever I'm near a friend's place I make sure to start/stop my ride in a non-descript location. I guess the big revelation here is that the people recording their activities on the military bases weren't bright enough to set a privacy zone or set the activity as private. Although there was talk recently that Strava was ignoring privacy settings for generating the heat map.