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cmmata
Shkhara
Status: Existing

It would be helpful to have the option to hide the start and end of the activities by GPS coordinates or manually selecting from a map, rather than using the postal address (city, street, number, etc.). This way, people like me that live outside cities and villages would have the option to hide their house's location.

In my case, for example, I live outside a village and the road that leads to my home (and some others in the surroundings) does not have any name, postal address service, or anything. So I only have the option to hide all activities start and end, or simply hide a lot of kilometers from the last known address. Which of course would do the job, but with the first one I would lose the possibility to show people where I start routes in the mountain, and with the second I would lose a lot of Strava segments near my home.

Thank you anyway for reading my proposal 🙂

Carles

9 Comments
Simon
Pico de Orizaba

This is already achievable, please check this link to see if this solution suits your purpose.
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000173384-Edit-Map-Visibility

 

eric
Elbrus

Ditto what Simon said. From that page:

Adjusting Individual Activities

On either the Strava mobile app or website, open the activity you wish to adjust and select the ellipses icon (from the upper right-hand corner on the app and left-hand side on the website).

  • Select Edit Map Visibility.
  • Use the sliders to specify the portion you would like to hide

Strava profile: https://www.strava.com/athletes/3170505 (Check out my daily photos!)
Strava member since 2013
Status changed to: Existing
Soren
Denali

Correct, this is already an existing feature. Thanks for pointing that out @Simon and @eric 

cmmata
Shkhara

Hi!

Thank you all for the responses. I was not aware of that option, and indeed can help me with the privacy. But as I understand, I need to do this in every activity I upload to Strava right?

The original question was more about a general option, like the one you have in preferences / privacy / map visibility. From there, I can hide automatically the start and end of all activities (past and future I guess) that start or end at a specific address. That's where I would like to add gps coordinates or select from a map. That way I could select some distance near my home, and simply forget about it and not opening every activity as soon as Strava gets it. Like I have been doing for some years while I was living in a house with an address.

But anyway, I can try that option while I don't have any other way to do it. Thanks again for your suggestions!

Sunny415
Strava
Strava

Hi @cmmata, thanks for your question. Map Visibility settings offer multiple options that can be used in conjunction with one another to get you the experience you’re looking for, including hiding locations via GPS coordinates. Reviewing the full thread here, though, I want to point out that for some athletes, hiding start and end points anywhere by default, then unhiding those portions for certain activities, may be easier than manually hiding maps individually after upload.

With that said, we do our best to find locations using postal codes and GPS coordinates, though, our resources are as complete as the databases from which we pull this data. Here are our tips to hide activity maps by location:

  • If you’re having trouble using an address or postal code to hide your terminal points by location in the Strava app, you may find success trying it out on Strava.com. The opposite is true too: if you’re unsuccessful on Strava.com, try through the Strava app. 
  • Similarly, try hiding your terminal points by location using GPS coordinates. You will want to pull your coordinates from the appropriate source. If you are trying to set this up via the Strava Android app, pull the appropriate coordinates from Google Maps. If you are in the Strava iOS app, pull coordinates from Apple Maps. And if you are on Strava.com, you can use Mapbox to find the appropriate coordinates. Coordinates in decimal format should be available through each source, which you can enter into your Map Visibility settings. 

In a small number of cases, we are unable to pull up the correct location using postal codes or GPS coordinates. We recommend that athletes who encounter this situation use other map visibility settings, such as hiding terminal points anywhere or hiding maps completely, and encourage them to experiment with how they want to use default settings and individual activity settings in conjunction with one another. Our support team can answer questions specific to your settings configurations as well. 

Sunny
STRAVA | Support Team

waildizzy
Shkhara

I live in Marrakech, Morocco, I want to hide my home area but I can't select anything, when I enter an address nothing is in Morocco, even when I use the English name of my city (Marrakesh).

Capture d’écran 2023-08-05 à 14.37.02.png
In my country and many other country it's not easy to target an area with an address only so it's absolutely necessary to have the possibility to select or modify an area using the map and not only an address.

This feature is about privacy and need to be added as soon as possible, it's absolutely not acceptable than many users and some of them paying users can have the same level of privacy than most of Strava users.

zecanard
Superuser
Superuser

It’s actually possible to set GPS coordinates as your privacy zone; however, Strava’s instructions simply do not work on the website (it only accepts actual addresses, as far as I can figure out), and are otherwise incorrect.

I was able to enter GPS coordinates from Mapbox into the (iOS) app, but you have to invert them first. For instance, Mapbox gives -7.988547435161564,31.62547471541734 (longitude, latitude) as the coordinates for Pharmacie de la Place in Marrakech. If you enter that into the Strava app (or Apple Maps), you get a location in Tanzania. Instead, you have to input 31.62547471541734,-7.988547435161564 (latitude, longitude) into Strava.

Alternatively, you can grab the coordinates from Apple/Google Maps, but they have to be strictly numeric (remove the ° symbol and replace the NSEW indicator with negative values for W and S). On the plus side, no swapping necessary then.

Obviously, this is way too complicated. How many normal people understand how GPS coordinates work‽ I really wish we could just tap a location on the map, and have Strava set a privacy zone around it (plus a checkbox to randomly displace the pin). That’s how Relive does it, which is super user-friendly.

Back to your particular case @waildizzy, I was able to look up Marrakesh (with an s) using the Strava app.

waildizzy
Shkhara

Thank you very much for your very detailed answer @zecanard, I will try the GPS coordinates way.
You're right using the app we can find Marrakesh something impossible on the website.

Soren
Denali

@waildizzy thank you for letting us know that you were not able to add a location to hide your activities’ start and endpoints. We understand your concern regarding this situation.
While it is possible to hide an address in most situations using the Map Visibility settings on your Strava account, there may be some cases where the tool is unable to locate the intended address. We have certainly captured this information and shared with our team here at Strava.

To provide some more information about privacy controls:

When using your map visibility settings to hide an address, Strava uses a different service to look up your address depending on which of our platforms you are currently using. To troubleshoot this situation, we recommend looking up your address on multiple platforms to see if you find better results, as outlined in @Sunny415 's reply above.

If using the GPS coordinates does not work, we recommend using another Map Visibility setting such as hiding your start and endpoints no matter where they happen or hiding your maps completely. You can add these settings as the default for new activity uploads, and on individual activities for previously uploaded activities. Find out more about these settings here: https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000173384-Edit-Map-Visibility 


We also would like to extend a big thank you to @zecanard for providing such detailed, helpful information on how to find useable coordinates! @waildizzy -- can you let us know if any of these solutions worked for you?