How to hide your home on Strava and other running apps

Why the start of a run gives your address away

A GPS route begins wherever you pressed start, and for most people who run alone that is the front door. Post the same loop three mornings a week and the map quietly answers two questions a stranger should not be able to answer: where you live, and when you are out.

The best-known example is not about homes at all. In November 2017 Strava published a global heatmap built, the BBC reported, from one billion activities and about three trillion data points recorded between 2015 and September 2017. In January 2018 Nathan Ruser, a student working with the Institute for United Conflict Analysts, noticed that it lit up military bases in places like Afghanistan and Syria, because almost everyone logging runs there was foreign military personnel. The Guardian quoted him: "US Bases are clearly identifiable and mappable."

According to the BBC, Strava said the heatmap was anonymised and excluded activities marked private and user-defined privacy zones. In other words, the settings existed; the people on that map simply had not used them. "You can establish a pattern of life," Ruser told the BBC. The same is true of one runner and one street.

The three Map Visibility options on Strava

Strava's help center describes the default plainly: once you have uploaded your first activity, the first and last 200 meters of your future activity maps are hidden the next time you open the app. You can widen that. In the mobile app, open settings from the icon in the upper right of the You tab, then choose Privacy Controls and Map Visibility. On the website, go to Settings, Privacy Controls, and look for Map Visibility under Additional Controls.

1. Hide around an address. Enter your address and Strava hides the part of any past or future activity that starts or ends nearby. This is the only option that also reaches back into your history, except for activities whose map you have edited one by one.
2. Hide the start and end of every activity. This trims every run wherever it begins, which helps if you also start from work, a partner's place, or a gym. It applies only to future activities.
3. Hide the entire map. The activity stays visible to whoever its privacy setting allows, without the route. This also applies only to future activities.

The hidden distance can be set within a one-mile radius. If an address zone and the start-and-end trim overlap, Strava applies the larger one. Each activity also has its own Map Visibility control under the three-dot menu, and editing it overrides your defaults for that activity.

Map visibility is not the same as activity privacy

Strava keeps two separate switches. Activity privacy decides who can open an activity at all, with three choices: Everyone, Followers, or Only You. Map Visibility decides how much of the route those people see. Strava gives the example directly: an activity set to Everyone with the start and end hidden is still visible to everyone, just without its endpoints.

On your own copy, Strava shows the hidden parts in gray and the visible parts in orange, so it is worth opening a few recent runs to check what other people actually see. Activities set to Followers or Only You are not eligible for public segment leaderboards. Hiding part of a map has a similar side effect: segment times inside the hidden part do not appear on leaderboards and only you can see those matches.

Strava is also candid about the limit of all this. Its help page says applying Map Visibility settings does not mean it would be impossible for someone to deduce a hidden location using additional information. A gap that sits in the same place at the start of fifty runs is itself a clue.

Habits that matter more than any setting

The Road Runners Club of America lists the same two habits in its runner safety tips: vary your routine so it is not too predictable when you run alone, and be thoughtful about what you post online about your routes. Settings trim the map; habits decide whether there is a pattern to trim.

In practice that means a few things. Start recording a few streets away from home now and then, so the trimmed gap is not always in the same spot. Post after you are back rather than while you are out. Mix up start times and loops, especially the ones you run alone or in the dark. And look at your profile the way a stranger would, logged out or from a friend's account, before deciding it is fine.

Common mistakes

Assuming the default covered your old runs. The automatic 200 meter trim applies to future activities. Years of earlier runs keep whatever setting they had, unless you add an address zone, which Strava applies to past activities too.

Relying on a tiny trim on a quiet street. On a dead-end road, removing 200 meters may leave only a handful of houses the route could have come from. A larger radius, or an address zone, closes that gap.

Hiding the endpoints but leaving everything on Everyone. That is a valid choice, but it is not anonymity. Your name, your times, and the middle of every route stay public.

Forgetting the apps that show where you started. Live tracking links are a separate case. Strava's own help page for Beacon, its live-location feature, says recipients see where you started recording, so send that link only to people you would give your address to anyway.

If you want to run with strangers watching rather than friends, Cheerstep, a live running map where people far away can send you a cheer, builds the same protections in without a setting to look for. Nothing is broadcast until you are about 250 m from where you started, the trail left on the map loses at least the first and last 200 m, and anyone inside the safe radius you pick, from 10 to 500 km, does not see you at all. Cheerstep is not affiliated with Strava.

Frequently asked questions