Strava

Strava is a social fitness platform that allows users to track and share their athletic activities. Users can connect their GPS watches or other devices, enter activities manually, or use Strava’s in-app GPS to upload their workout for their followers or the public to see. A number of different sport types are supported by the platform, including running, hiking, swimming, and even several more niche sports such as kitesurfing, snowshoeing, and badminton. Once uploaded, Strava offers many tools and data points to give users a deeper insight into their activity and support them in their training. The goal of Strava is to get people to stay active and encourage healthy competition, but some ethical issues have been raised surrounding the app. One concern is the mental health of Strava users. The app's features can create a competitive environment, which has the potential to lead to obsessive tendencies and unhealthy behaviors. Furthermore, the app encourages users to share their location and includes many features related to its users’ location data, which has sparked controversy concerning the privacy and safety of Strava users. The app’s use of their user’s data to benefit communities has also received some backlash, as Strava’s user demographics are not representative of the general population. In response, Strava has updated their policies and has made efforts to make beneficial changes to their platform.

History

Strava was launched in 2009 by Micahel Horvarth and Mark Gainey. The two founders were both rowers at Harvard, and they missed the competitiveness of being a college athlete. To fill this void, they came up with an idea for a social media app for athletes, with features that allowed athletes to share their activities to ignite competition and motivation for staying active. They named the platform Strava, which means “to strive” in Swedish. Since then, the app has continued to gain popularity, and today more than 7 billion athletic activities have been shared on the platform worldwide.

Features

Fitness Features

Strava provides its users with a number of performance stats that are meant to aid them in their training. These statistics include, but are not limited to, elevation gain, calories burned, pace, and heart rate. Strava uses their users location data to increase their quality of workout. For example, the app provides users with running and cycling routes nearby that may not be obvious by just looking at a map. Though the app can be downloaded for free, there are a few more advanced features that require a subscription, such as the development of personalized training plans based on past activities, access to advanced performance metrics, and personal heatmaps.

Social Features

One of the largest factors that sets Strava apart from other fitness tracking apps is its social aspect. Strava markets itself as a social network for athletes, which is an accurate description, as it includes many features that strongly resemble the features of other social media apps. Users create a profile where they can include personal information such as a profile picture, biography, and their location. These profiles also feature the users’ exercise activities that function similarly to posts on other social platforms. Each activity contains a few data points about the workout, as well as a map of where the workout took place (if the user used a GPS device). The user then has the option to personalize the activity: they can add a title, give it a caption, and even include pictures. Their activity will then show up on their followers feed, where they can comment on and give “kudos”, which is the Strava version of likes. Strava users can also enter challenges, in which they are rewarded with a badge on their profile if they complete the required mileage, as well as compete to be on local leaderboards, where they can compare their performance against others who have completed the same local segment, which are sections of a route where users can compete against one another for the fastest time.

Location Services

Strava Metro

Strava has millions of users who have opted to share their location data, and with that information Strava has implemented Strava Metro. When a user goes on a run, hike, or bike ride, Strava tracks the path they took via GPS and this information contributes to a very large dataset for all Strava users. Strava Metro utilizes this information, but aggregates and anonymizes it to protect the privacy of the individual users. Strava then analyzes this massive dataset to look for trends and insights. For example, this data will show paths that are highly frequented, paths that are avoided, and areas where athletes often start or end their activities. Furthermore, this data can show areas where many accidents have occurred, revealing areas that may be dangerous spots in a city. Strava Metro shares this valuable information with governments and urban planners, which can be extremely helpful in making decisions about transportation, infrastructure improvements, and safety measures. Strava Metro’s ultimate goal is to improve cities for their users and all other pedestrians, cyclists, and athletes in order to build safer communities and encourage healthy lifestyles. To make Strava Metro more accessible, the company made it free to all organizations in 2020, and it is now being used to help over 1,500 communities improve their transportation systems.

Ethical Concerns

Mental Health

While the emphasis that Strava puts on the social aspect of fitness and competition can be a valuable tool for promoting healthy habits, there have been some concerns about the potential negative effects it could have on mental health. Whether it is getting kudos and comments from friends, earning badges from challenges, or climbing local leaderboards, users are rewarded for running further, faster, and more often than their fellow athletes. A study done at the National University of Ireland, Galway found that while these features can help many people stay motivated, others are negatively affected by the competition that the app encourages. The authors revealed that some Strava users possess an obsessive passion for exercise, and the constant comparison that is found on the app only worsens this obsession and leads to burnout. These users put too much pressure on themselves to perform well and gain recognition from their peers, which eventually leads to physical and emotional exhaustion. On the other hand, it was found that many users did not experience these negative effects, and were able to exhibit self-control and keep a well-balanced lifestyle. For these users, Strava had mostly positive effects, encouraging them to exercise and stay healthy. Another concern is that Strava enables users who are overly concerned with how their life is viewed by others, specifically in the form of data. These individuals are known as “data point identities”.

Safety and Privacy

So many of Strava’s features, including heatmaps, segments, Beacon, and more, require users to share their location with the app, and a few of those features even require users to share their locations with their followers and the public. Because of this, there has been some controversy surrounding the privacy and safety of those who choose to share their location. One major issue surrounded Strava’s heatmap. The Strava heatmap is a map that is updated monthly that uses Strava users’ activities to show the most popular locations for athletic activities. Roads and paths that show up often in activities appear brighter on the map, where less frequented paths appear darker. However, in January of 2018, it became clear to security analysts that this heatmap was revealing the location of military bases. Many military sites are located in areas where Strava is not popular among the people living there, so American service members are some of the only people using Strava in these locations. Therefore, the heatmap reveals the running routes of these military personnel, which could put troops at risk of attack. Another safety concern involves Strava’s feature Flyby. With Flyby, users can see which other Strava users that they passed by during their activity, given that the other user has their location turned on. This allows athletes in the same area to connect and build community, but it also could be seen as an invasion of privacy and a safety risk.