Listen up! This one’s important. Well, all of our privacy tips are important, but this one applies to anyone who uses Strava, no matter what you’re here for. Yep, we’re talking about how your Profile and Activities show up (or don’t) on the internet to logged out viewers.
Read on to find out what shows up by default, what options you have, and what someone sees when they view your profile or activities without a Strava account.
Profile Page
Like many other apps, Strava allows you to share your Profile information with people even if they don’t have a Strava account, or if they are logged out. We allow this but we don’t require it. You can use your Privacy Controls to choose the option that suits you.
Public profile: If you have Profile Visibility set to “Everyone,” your Profile page will appear in search engine results—even to someone logged out or without a Strava account. Please note, this is the default setting for Strava users unless you’re under 18.
To see your full profile, the viewer will need to be logged into a Strava account. If they are logged out or don’t have a Strava account, they will see a condensed version of your profile page like this:
How to hide your profile page from search results and logged out viewers
If you do not want your profile page to be visible while logged out of Strava or you do not want your profile page appearing in search engine results, adjust your profile page privacy control to “Followers”. You can do this via your Privacy Controls settings page on the Strava website or via the ‘Privacy Controls’ option within Settings in the Strava mobile app.
Here is a look at the same profile page as shown above when the profile page privacy control is set to “Followers”:
Activity Page
Similar to your profile page, your activities each have a logged out page that can be viewed by navigating to the activity’s URL. However, two conditions must be true in order for information from the activity to be visible while logged out:
- The activity’s privacy control must be set to “Everyone”
- Your profile page privacy control must be set to “Everyone”
If both of those are true, someone logged out of Strava or without an account will see a version of the activity that looks like this:
If your activity’s privacy control or your profile page privacy control are set to “Followers”, we won’t show anything about your activity. Instead, they’ll see a login screen like this:
Activities which use the “Only You” privacy control are never visible to anyone other than yourself, either while logged in or logged out.
Pop quiz: What if you have an Everyone activity and a Followers profile? Will someone logged out of Strava be able to see your activity or profile?
Select the text between the arrows to reveal the answer: →Nope. They’ll see the logged out page (even if they’re trying to view your Everyone activity).←
Appearing in Search Engine Results
Depending on your settings, your Strava account or activities may be more likely to appear in results of third-party search engines such as Google. Any account on Strava can appear in search results, though accounts included in Strava’s “sitemap” are more likely to appear. (Remember, if you set your Profile visibility to Followers, the search result will not show your profile page. It will show the logged out page with the stock photo.)
A sitemap is a file which provides information to a search engine about which pages are most important to crawl so that the pages are indexed by the search provider. You can learn more about sitemaps here in this article written by Google.
In order for your account to appear in Strava’s sitemap, three conditions must all be true:
- Your account’s Profile Page privacy control must be set to “Everyone”
- Your account’s default Activities privacy control must be set to “Everyone”
- You must be at least 18 years old
If any of these conditions are false, your account will not be included in Strava’s sitemap. While being excluded from Strava’s sitemap lessens the chance that your profile or activities will be included in search results, it does not guarantee that they will not appear. For example, if your profile or activities are linked to from another location, a blog post or article on another website, those sources may cause your account to be indexed.
When updating the privacy controls on your Strava account, it can take up to 7 days for your changes to influence your appearance in Strava’s sitemap.
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