Sharing routes safely: Strava privacy zones, hidden start/end and what still leaks

The common feature is a radius. You nominate an address, or the platform uses the start and finish of each activity, and the part of the route inside a circle of 200 m to 1 km is simply not drawn for other viewers. On Strava this lives under Map Visibility, with privacy zones for specific addresses and a separate option that hides the start and end of every activity. Garmin Connect and Komoot have equivalents under different names and with different defaults.

Two things are worth checking on any platform. First, whether the setting applies to activities you have already published or only to new ones. Second, whether it applies to your followers as well as to the public, because several platforms treat those as separate audiences.

The structural point is that all of this is a display rule. The full track is still stored, still used for your own statistics, and still handed back to you in full when you export the activity.

Segment leaderboards are a separate system. If you have ridden a segment near your house two hundred times, your presence on its leaderboard is public information that no map setting removes. The segment's own start point is visible to everybody, and a rider with a long history on a cluster of nearby segments is easy to place.

Activity titles, photographs, the club you belong to and the people you follow all add context. None of them is sensitive on its own. Together with a leaderboard cluster they narrow a neighbourhood quickly.

The practical response is not to delete your account. It is to keep the most predictable routes — the ones that begin at your door several times a week — out of the public feed, and to accept that anything published repeatedly becomes a pattern.

On a group ride, everyone records the same route. If one of them has no privacy settings, their activity shows the whole thing, including the point where the group formed and where each rider peeled off. Tagging turns that into a link back to you.

Photographs are the other common leak. A photo taken on a phone with location services enabled carries GPS coordinates in its EXIF block. Some platforms remove that on upload and some do not, and those that do strip it from the copy they serve — not from the file you sent them.

You cannot control other people's settings. You can decide which rides start at home, and you can ask the group — which works more often than people expect.

This is the point that surprises people most. When you export your own activity as GPX, you get the recorded track — all of it, from the first fix to the last, with timestamps and sensor data intact. A privacy zone is a rule applied while drawing a map for somebody else; it is not a property of the data.

So the moment that file goes onto a forum, into a race report, to a coach or into a route planner, every protection you set up on the platform stops applying. What you are handing over is the original.

That is precisely the case a cleaning tool exists for: open the export, trim the ends, delete the areas that matter, remove the fields you do not want to publish, and share the cleaned copy instead of the file the platform gave you.

Work in the order that matters. Trim first — the start and the finish, by different amounts on different files, so the numbers themselves do not become a pattern. Then add zones for whatever the trim does not cover: a friend's house where you stopped, the office, the school run.

Then decide about time. Removing every timestamp turns the activity into a route and hides the routine; keeping only relative times preserves pace and duration while dropping the date. Shifting the start to a date and time you choose is the middle option, for when the schedule matters more than the calendar.

Finally the labels: the track name, the description, the author, the link back to the original activity, waypoints named after places, and the creator attribute that names your watch. None of them affects the route, and every one of them is read by anyone who opens the file.

Does the file still begin and end at a place you use regularly? Does any single point sit within a hundred metres of a home, a school or a workplace? If three files were cleaned the same way, would they still point at the centre you are trying to hide?

Do the timestamps describe a schedule? Are there waypoints with names? Does the author field or a link identify the account? Does the creator attribute name your device? Has a distinctive loop or an elevation profile become the signature of one specific hill?

And the question that decides the rest: does this file need to be public at all, or would sending it to one person privately do the same job? Cleaning a file is cheap. Unpublishing one is not.