Was curious if there any thoughts on a feature Strava has, allowing you to mark a home address & “blurring” the start/end of runs from that location.
Also, is there any feedback on allowing users to view the map of just the streets they have ran (colored lines) without any actual street map labels/roads visible?
That Strava setting doesn’t fit well within CityStrides because if a circle around your house/work was taken out of your LifeMap you’d end up clearly seeing exactly where you live/work. It would have the exact opposite effect.
The view of just streets completed … are you describing a view of your LifeMap without any background?
I want to do that and allow people to purchase posters of that view.
Now that the map is filling in more, I can see what you mean about the home privacy setting. Will have to check it out more, and see if it makes it super obvious when checking out others.
Yes, that is what I was meaning. I just found the site today & don’t have my wallet on me, do plan to become a regular contributor. Another thing my wife & I do is print custom apparel, and decorative pieces (testing printing on wood). Would enjoy discussing a project of doing full color, custom shirts for the site & users. I saw there was a post from a couple years ago about doing shirts, didn’t see if that went too far.
The more I run from my home, the blurrier my home gets. I now refer to the area around my house as “The Big Purple Blob.” GPS inaccuracy is your friend.
The issue is if people look at individual runs, and depending on where your home is, it may not be as anonymous.
I’ve moved again, so I am making sure I always start my runs from the same spot, which is after a brief warm up from the house.
I use a Garmin and Strava.
Both have ways to hide your “home” location:
Understanding Privacy Zones in Garmin Connect
I have read these settings do affect CityStrides, as it no longer has good data, near your privacy zone.
But, I always figured this is the area you are going to finish first, or probably already have, with your first big sync, so a privacy setting won’t have much affect on street completion. Going forward, you likely already have your home area done.
I don’t use the settings, but have read they too create a blob, that more or less identifies your home area. This is what @fredrik.coulter is saying.
Not sure about other sync options, but at least for these two, it’s not really needed at CityStrieds (unless I’m missing something). Need to check MapMyRun and RunKeeper for similar settings (for my own curiosity). I’ll edit this post with what I find.
Edit: Well if MapMyRun and RunKeeper have a similar setting, it’s not as obvious.
Just run lots of circles around a block far from home. Then they won’t know which purple blob is your home. Problem solved. j/k
Privacy is certainly an issue for some and I totally get that. I guess if you were concerned you could mark your privacy in settings to just you. Not sure if there is a better solution.
Relying on Strava’s “Privacy Zones” for months/years then using those same activities on City Strides doesn’t fare well.
That Strava setting doesn’t fit well within CityStrides because if a circle around your house/work was taken out of your LifeMap you’d end up clearly seeing exactly where you live/work. It would have the exact opposite effect.
You poss. know by now @JamesChevalier but Strava’s privacy zone doesn’t centre on the address you’re trying to conceal, it’s a random, offset zone (of a specified radius, up to 2 miles) around that location instead, and only the start and finish of an activity is hidden so you can run in and out of the zone and it be visible as part of your activity.
With this in mind, a privacy zone wouldn’t necessarily be a dead zone that pinpoints a location you’re trying to keep private.
I’d like to resurrect this idea.
I had a new concept: “stop updating lifemap in this region” feature.
The workflow:
This would avoid the “obvious home is here” mass of purple lines, while also avoiding the “giant bare circle I obviously live in” problem.
I also wonder if individual activities can be made private, without making lifemaps private? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about trimming each activity. Only “trimming” the lifemap updates.
Updates on November 3, 2023 (Release 917) updated the LifeMap to no longer rely on rebuilds. It’s all live queries to the database.
I think your proposed process assumes a person starts from scratch and does no repetitious running.
The start/end for each activity would still exist, highlighting your most frequent start/end points.
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding something here.
Yeah, there’s a privacy setting to choose the privacy level for each activity. A person could set themselves as either fully public/private, then switch to per-activity privacy, then toggle particular activities they wanted private/public. One caveat being that these changes are all done in background jobs, so there may be a delay before the setting is fully switched over - waiting some seconds between making the changes will avoid issues with that.
(Under the hood, it’s all per-activity privacy but when you choose Everyone/Just Me it sets that value on all of your activities.)
Yes, my approach would be for new users. e.g. Run your neighbourhood, then quickly block out that area from further lifemap updates. So you’d have a handful of runs pointing to your house, but not thousands.
If your lifemap is live and not being generated in a kind of “layered, chronological” process, I guess that could never work.
Dang, thought I had a good idea there.