Privacy settings: Separate option to allow profile view and auto-accept followers

[Inslandschauer]

I searched this forum, but didn't find a similar request so I post it as a new request and try to explain it a bit.

My request relates to Strava's privacy settings and the visibility of my profile. I used to have my profile page to be visible to everyone. But when it is set like this everyone can become a follower of my Strava activitities without my explicit acceptance. As I sometimes post some activities that I only want to be visible to people I know (e.g. bike tours with my kids), I had to set my profile visibility to followers-only to prevent unknown people to view some activities I don't want to share with them.

So, if there would be two separate options for settings profile visibility and behavior for accepting new followers I would really appreciate this because I think it is part of Strava's core features to see e.g. the background and training effort of those guys who are the local KOMs or those who perform similar to yourself. 

[Jane]

Hello @Inslandschauer 

​​Thanks for submitting your idea. It has been reviewed by our moderation team and is now open to voting.

[-Charles-]

We appreciate hearing these thoughts, @Inslandschauer!

My name is Charles and I am a privacy specialist here at Strava. I wanted to reflect on our current privacy control options to ensure that you feel like you have a thorough understanding of the settings available and how these settings affect your Strava account.

When it comes to your Strava profile page and the activities uploaded to your Strava account, these features have different privacy controls.

The profile page privacy control on your Strava account allows you to control the visibility of the information on your profile page. When the 'Everyone' privacy control setting is used, anyone on Strava can search for and view your complete profile page. When the 'Followers' privacy control is used, athletes on Strava will still be able to search for and find your Strava account. However, athletes who do not follow your account will see a version of your profile page with a limited amount of details. In order to see your full profile, these athletes would first need to be approved as followers.

The activity privacy control on your Strava account is applied to each new activity you upload to your account and allows you to define who can view your activities. Once an activity has been uploaded to your account, you can edit the individual activity's privacy control if you would like to use a different setting than the default setting used on your account. Activities set to 'Everyone' can be viewed by anyone on Strava and will be included on leaderboards. On the other hand, activities which use the 'Followers' privacy control will only be visible to athletes who follow you on Strava. These activities will not be visible to athletes who do not follow your Strava account, will not be displayed on leaderboards, and will not appear on your profile page when non-followers view your profile. Finally, activities which use the 'Only You' privacy control are only visible to you and cannot be seen by anyone else on Strava. While activities set to 'Followers' can only be viewed by athletes who follow your Strava account, activities set to 'Only You' are invisible to anyone except for you.

As you can see, your profile page and activity privacy controls can be set to different values and do not need to be set identically. I hope that this information distinguishing the profile page privacy control and the activity privacy control help you better understand how you can adjust your privacy settings to achieve the intended experience. Let us know if you have further questions and thank you again for sharing your suggestion with our community!

[Inslandschauer]

Thank you Charles for your detailed explanation. I think I'm somewhat aware of the privacy options.

My only point is that I would basically like to share my profile page with all Strava members while I want to stay in control of who follows my "follower-only" activities. 

I think this is currently not possible. A few more words about the motivation for this: When I have a look at e.g. the leader boards of some interesting segments around, I appreciate it if I can see how those people are practicing. Currently I m preparing for a trailrunning event and I found some people who finished this event last year pretty well. Seeing their preparation for this event might help a little to adjust my training or at least allows me to compare my training with theirs. And this is, of course, only possible if people share their profiles. And maybe some people might find my training experience helpful, too.

[-Charles-]

You are correct. It is not currently possible to reveal your profile in the way that the 'Everyone' privacy control does while retaining the ability to approve athletes before they become a follower on your account. Nevertheless, your feedback is definitely appreciated on this subject. We will be sure to consider the desire you have detailed as we continue development of our service.

[Lenny123]

@-Charles- would you be able to to share why it is not possible to be selective about which "following you" users can see certain activities?

It is such a frequently requested feature, and pretty much every other social media platform allows for it. A technical explanation of why it's not possible would be great to understand the reason behind this gap in features. 

I understand that Strava's moto is "There’s always time for a workout" but we don't all work for Strava unfortunately, so having better privacy controls would be much appreciated 

[-Charles-]

@Lenny123 We certainly hear you regarding your feedback! In fact, I would like to point you to another post on our Community Hub which holds feedback along the lines of what you've provided here: https://communityhub.strava.com/t5/ideas/privacy-add-more-options-for-choosing-which-followers-group...

That post above is still gathering kudos and comments, so I definitely encourage you to contribute your thoughts so that we have the information collected with the other contributions.

"Unlisted" activities or activities which are only shared with specific followers is certainly an interesting improvement which I could see providing a lot of utility. While I'm not sure I'm able to get into truly technical information, the reason it is not possible to share an activity with only a subset of your followers is because the functionality has not been added to Strava's codebase. While on the surface it may seem trivially easy to append an additional privacy setting to the options currently available, the addition of such a setting actually requires extensive work across many teams here at Strava. A major effort would be required to perform the necessary work and the change would have impacts to many different features. Even our Support team would need to perform significant work to prepare to support the new option. For this reason, adding additional activity privacy control options is not an effort which a small team could accomplish within a brief period of time.

That being said, we definitely appreciate hearing about how Strava could be made more useful for you. We want our platform to be as useful as possible and your ideas help us prioritize our future efforts.