Strava Privacy and Account Settings

1. How to set up your Strava Profile:

• Go to the Strava web site at www.strava.com  
• Sign up for an account by using either your Facebook profile, Google profile, Apple ID of just an email address. ACC advice is to use an email and for privacy purposes do not link your Strava profile sign up to Facebook, Google or Apple.
• Use an email: enter your email address and a password for Strava
• Enter your First Name, Last Name, Gender and Date of Birth. Please enter these correctly so that the ACC can verify your identify as a member school student.
• If you have privacy concerns you can request an anonymous Strava username from the ACC via your school sports coordinator.
• Strava will then ask if you want to connect with your friends that are already on Strava or Facebook. ACC advice is to not connect to other people at this stage. Skip these sections.
• Strava Summit: a basic Strava account is free, but there is a paid account called Summit. ACC advice for now is to select Maybe Later and just join with the basic free account. You can always go back later to upgrade your account.
• Click the Get Started button.
• My Profile: once you have created your profile on Strava you can edit your profile settings to provide additional information such as a photo, your weight, a personal bio, your gear i.e shoes/bike, your location. ACC advice is that to protect your  your privacy and security then don’t use a personal self-portrait photo, don’t share personal info in your bio, don’t list your home suburb location and don’t publicly share info about your bike or shoes.

2. How to set your Strava Privacy settings:

Like all social media platforms, to use the Strava service safely and responsibly the ACC is recommending that all students follow these privacy settings on their Strava account.

• There is a very good YouTube video clip that explains how to set the privacy settings in Strava and it is recommended that all ACC club members watch this clip https://youtu.be/vyXVINH3uRs?t=31
• Once your profile is created go to your profile on the Strava web site and then go to settings and then the Privacy tab on the left.
• Turn on the Enhanced Privacy tick box, this brings up all the privacy control settings or Where You Appear on Strava.
• Profile Page – Who Can See – select Followers so only people that you allow to follow you can see your complete profile page.
• Activities – Who Can See – select Followers so only people that you allow to follow you can see your activity details of what you have done on Strava. If you want complete privacy then select Only You which hides all your activities on Strava.
• Groups Activities – Who Can See – select Followers so that only your followers can see activities that you completed as a group.
• Flyby – Who Can See – select No One so that your activities will not be visible to anyone on Strava. Flybys provide an in depth activity playback and may compromise your location security if you allow Everyone to watch this.
• Privacy Zones: this is a very important privacy feature so that you can set your home suburb (or any other location) as your privacy zone. This means that anywhere in this zone will be hidden on your Strava activities. There is a short video on the ACC YouTube Channel with instructions https://youtu.be/CaXz9qqjKQM 
• To set your privacy zone: Enter just your Suburb as the address, select the radius to 1000m and then click create privacy zone. This setting can be changed at any time and if you are doing most of your running away from your home suburb then you should change the setting to hide the area where you start most of your runs from. If you don’t set a privacy zone around your home or usual start point, then this can became a security issue as other people on Strava may be able to see your activity maps and start points.
• Metro and Heatmap: this is a personal choice whether you tick or not. Ticking just enables Strava to collected aggregated data about where athletes run/ride/swim. It doesn’t show your activities if they are marked as private. If you are concerned about your privacy or not sure then don’t tick the box.
• Edit Past Activities: this feature enables you to reset the privacy settings in bulk for all your old activities. ACC advice is to leave this unticked for now. If you wish to change the privacy of your old activities in the future you can go back and change this setting.
• Training Log: changing this setting to Public will open up all your Strava activities to anyone on Strava. ACC advice is to leave this as the default Private setting unless your coach or teacher suggests that you change this in the future.
• Sharing my activities with my followers: If left unticked, this allows Strava to send notifications to your Followers about your recent activities. If ticked Strava doesn’t send any notifications to your Followers. If you are careful about who you allow as a follower then this is safe and good fun as you can be social with your friends and followers about your activities on Strava. But if you have any privacy concerns then tick the box. ACC advice is to leave unticked and be careful about only allowing people you know to follow you on Strava.
• Parents, students and schools need to decide what level of privacy they want on Strava. For complete privacy you can of course select all the above settings at the maximum privacy level. While this will mask all of your activity on Strava, it also means you will miss out on the social and community aspect of Strava which is part of the fun. ACC advice is to still allow your Followers to view your activities and send you notifications on Strava, as long as you are very judicious as to who you allow to be your Followers. Never accept a Follower request from an athlete you don’t know.