Earlier this summer, Strava began offering aweeklyheatmap.
What is Stravas weekly heatmap?
Strava offers a number ofmapping toolsthat help you to find places to run or ride.
There has long been aglobal heatmapas well, but that only tells you what routes are popular in general.
The weekly heatmap gives you a real-time view of where people are goingnow.
How the weekly heatmap can make your lonely running routes stand out
Heres what I mean.
Lately Ive been running almost daily, and most of my runs occur in the neighborhood around my house.
This is very different from what the global heatmap shows.
The weekly heatmap is another story, though.
It looks like I and probably one other person share a favorite couple of roads in my neighborhood.
Sometimes I run laps up and down a certain road; that road glows brighter than the rest.
Zooming out, I can see other neighborhoods where theres pretty clearly one person with a favorite route.
Do I know these people?
But I think I know at least one of their names.
A segment is a bit of a route that has a title and a leaderboard.
Two of them ran it once; the other has run it repeatedly.
To satisfy my curiosity, I looked at the countys real estate records for houses on that street.
But the weekly heatmap led me right to their house.
However, these activities are not eligible for segment leaderboards.
(You canread Stravas explanation of the privacy tweaks here.)
Strava also allows you to automatically hide the start and end points of your activities.
But it doesnt change the fact that a stranger could figure out that you run a certain route often.
Another partial solution is to change your name and profile picture so that they dont contain any identifying information.
Finally,theres a setting that will remove your data from the global and weekly heatmaps.
(Its too bad they dont have those as two separate parameters.)
Go to parameters, and then Privacy Controls, and scroll to Map Visibility.
There is a checkbox labeled Contribute your activity data to de-identified, aggregate data sets.
