Runners and cycling enthusiasts who are frequent users popular fitness app Strava may leave their location data exposed
The Strava records your runs and bike rides and also creates competitions between you and other users who frequent the same routes. Using the Heatmap mode of the application, North Carolina State University researchers were able to predict user locations with approx Present in several = 37.5%.
Η Heatmap mode, added in 2015, lets you see a visual representation of the most popular running and cycling routes for other Strava users. This can be especially helpful if you're running or cycling in a new location for the first time.
More active users who frequently use the app on the same routes generate more “heat” on the map and are more easily identified than occasional users or those who change their routes more often.
Hide your start and stop address through the app's privacy controls. (Credit: Strava)
As he says Bleeping Computer, his researchers NCSU collected data from Strava heatmaps in Arkansas, Ohio, and North Carolina for a month and overlaid the heatmap images with images from OpenStreetMaps, a free geographic database. The study concluded that locating users' home addresses in heatmaps is feasible, mainly because users provide their full names and profile pictures to the app.
But before you uninstall Strava, you have a few options to help keep your location data safe. For starters, if you don't want to contribute to the app's heatmap, turn it off aggregate data usage control, which blocks all activities, or do it activity visibility private. Another option is to hide the area around the start and end points of your activities up to 1 mile through the app's privacy controls listed in the settings menu.
In a statement, the Strava reports in Bleeping Computer that it only produces a heat map in areas where "many people have completed an activity" and urges those who don't want to contribute to a heat map to turn off the feature in the app.
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