Confidentiality on Strava: How to hide your journeys and protect your privacy?

They are called the “Strava Leaks”. In 2020, Mediapart claimed to have found the identity of French military profiles, through the sportsmen’s favourite application, Strava. During an investigation into the platform, the French media pointed out the lack of attention to sensitive data recorded during the running or cycling outings of these personalities, some of whom were part of the Special Forces. A long-term job? Not really, according to the three journalists who had taken care of this research, based on the public accounts of a few military personnel. A formidable entry point, with exponential results, since they had managed to collect data on more than 1000 profiles, in the end.

The snitch that is Strava continued to make headlines in the following years. This was the case in October 2024 with the travels of President Emmanuel Macron's bodyguards, or this year 2025, with soldiers working on the nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SNLE) on the island of Longue in Finistère. Despite the evolution of the number of parameters available to Strava users to hide their journeys in part or completely, French sailors were compromising national security and the deterrence strategy, because of the broadcasting of their sporting prowess.

These media cases have above all highlighted the need to remain cautious when it comes to the broadcasting of our journeys on Strava. The application has understood this and offers options to let you choose, à la carte, what to show of your physical activity history, and to whom to show it. Whether it is to hide a Strava route punctually, in part or completely, the possibilities are numerous.

Hide your Strava routes

Hide the map

To begin, let's focus on the tools made available on the application to completely hide a Strava route. To make a cycling, walking, or running activity more confidential, it may be interesting to hide the map. To do this, you will need to go to the settings menu, located at the top right of the screen. Then click on the "Map visibility" tab in the list of additional controls. Here, several possibilities are available to you. The one that interests us is the command "Completely hide the maps of your activities". By selecting it, it will be possible to activate it, so that any new activity does not display a map.

The steps to hide the map:

1. Go to Strava settings
2. Map visibility
3. Activate “Completely hide your activity maps”

Make your profile private or secret

If you want to go further and completely hide your journeys, and therefore your activities, Strava offers, like other social networks such as Instagram, to change your account from Public to Private. It is even possible to set your profile so that it is only visible to you. To do this, go to the Strava settings menu, then to Privacy Settings. In the list of different possible settings, we will focus on the "Where you appear" section. It is possible to change your account from Public to Private by modifying "Profile Page" (to limit the display of your profile), but also by modifying "Activities" so that only your subscribers or yourself can access your sessions and therefore your Strava journeys.

In this menu, it is also possible to remove your activities and performances from certain parts of the Strava application, such as the "Local Legends" ranking, which lists the best performances of a specific segment, measured by the application. Finally, the menu can also regulate who can mention you, an important point to avoid seeing your name appear in the description of a Strava activity on which you would not like to be displayed. The function is the same to hide group activities, in other words to not appear in the mentions of the activity of athletes who have shared a session with you.

The steps to change your Strava profile from Public to Private

1. Go to Strava settings
2. Privacy settings
3. Switch to private "Profile Page" and/or "Activities" and/or "Group Activities" and/or "Local Legends"

Change the visibility of a specific outing

Halfway between hiding the map and completely hiding an activity or your Strava profile, we also offer to change the visibility of a specific outing, for a case-by-case adjustment, which will not have an impact on the rest of your activities. To do this, you will need to click on the activity in question, already recorded and synchronized on the application, and click on the three small dots located at the top right. They will allow access to several tools, such as “change map visibility”, to repeat the commands explained in the first part “hide a route”. Otherwise, clicking “Edit Activity” will change it from Public to Private, or to “Only You.”

Steps to change the map visibility of a specific trip:

1. Click on the activity you want to edit
2. Activity Settings
3. “Change Map Visibility” to hide the trip or “Edit Activity” to hide the exit entire

Partially hide a journey

Strava offers new privacy tools to partially hide your journeys and the details of your activities. If you want to keep your rides visible while protecting your privacy, there are several options.

Hide departures and arrivals

The most popular Strava feature for protecting your home address is the “Hide departures and arrivals” feature. It follows a simple principle: Strava erases the first and last parts of the route, so as not to compromise your place of residence. On the app, it is possible to hide these two parts within a more or less significant radius. Strava designates a distance between 100 and 400 meters by default, but it is possible to extend or shorten this. For privacy reasons, Strava enables this feature by default for users, and it should be disabled rather than enabled.

In any case, to access its settings, go to the “Map Visibility” menu, accessible punctually for a specific activity via the three small dots located at the top right of the activity, or via the general privacy menu, in the application settings, located at the top right of the main page. Then, select “Hide start and finish points, regardless of where you do them”, or “Hide start and finish points for activities that you do at a specific address”, if you want to enable the feature only when you run from and to your home.

Steps to hide the start and finish of an activity:

1. Go to Strava Privacy Settings
2. Map Visibility
3. Hide Start and Finish Points

Hide Activity Details

If you’re not interested in hiding a ride or a full ride, but would like to explore other ways to protect your privacy, Strava has a feature that allows you to hide activity details. Among the information that can be removed from public visibility is the start time of the activity. This is a great way to stop having to enter the exact time of day you were doing your workout. Other details that can be hidden are still privacy-related, but more from a mental health perspective, with the mask of heart rate, pace, power, or even calories burned.

Steps to hide the start time of an activity

1. Go to Strava privacy settings
2. Hidden details
3. Enable “Start time” hiding

Delete or block a user

Let's finish with an equally important point: deleting or blocking a Strava user. If you only want to keep a certain individual out of your sight, you will then have to block or remove them from your followers. By deleting them, they will no longer be able to see your activities (provided they set their account to Private). By blocking him, the individual will simply no longer be able to find your profile on Strava, from his account.

The steps to remove a Strava subscriber or block a profile:

1. Search for the profile that you want to remove from your subscribers or block
2. Click on the three dots at the top right of the profile
3. Remove subscribers, report or block this athlete

Other Strava privacy settings

Other settings exist in the Strava privacy menu, which can be used to secure your profile and make it more private. Among them, there is the profile (activated by default) which allows Strava to use photos of your activities, provided that your profile is public (visibility set to "Everyone" for your activities). The use of these photos by Strava allows the "Map of the application" tab to be populated, which gives users the possibility to create routes or join them. Strava geolocates the places where you have captured your photos during your outings, which gives other members of the application an overview of the paths taken and the landscapes crossed.

Strava also offers to deactivate the sharing of aggregated data. What does this correspond to? By depersonalizing your data, Strava makes available the data generated by its athletes in the form of a database called "Strava Metro", to report on the influence of certain roads compared to others, paths, cycle paths, and any other street. Strava explains that it offers this data to urban planners to make cities safer, but also and above all to the rest of the community to know where to run, at night for example, and which are the most popular routes and thus avoid finding yourself alone on the road.

Let's finish with a more radical parameter, which goes beyond protecting yourself from Strava members. In the settings, the app also gives its users the option to opt out of sharing their personal information with Strava for third-party targeted advertising purposes. The setting is disabled by default.