Think of your fitness tracker like a personal trainer—one that happens to live on your smartphone. There are things you want it to do, like monitor your heart rate, your pace, the time it took for you to complete your last sprint, and whether your sprints are getting faster over time. And then there are things you don't particularly want it to do, like stalk your every move and follow you home at night.
With fitness apps[1] that hoover up more and more data, it can be hard to split the difference. Consider Strava. The fitness app, which shares running and cycling routes on its social network, came under fire this week after releasing a heatmap[2] that showed the global activity of its millions of users. The map revealed more than just where people like to jog. By looking at the data, you could find the borders of secret military outposts, as well as track patrol routes of soldiers at those bases. As a national security issue[3] the implications are huge. It should also be a reminder to consumers that data collected by fitness apps reveal a lot about you and how you move about the world. And that data doesn’t always stay on your phone.
Strava sells itself as an activity tracker turned social network: You can see the most popular bike paths among other Strava cyclists, follow your friends’ running routes, or log your team 5K as a group exercise. It’s almost integral to the app that you share your location data in order to get the most out of it. And that comes with a privacy trade-off.
Track Record
Right out of the box, Strava is configured to upload all of...