[wvbdmp]

To be fair, I would assume that the base, or in this case the carrier, is the only place where they would have the reception to broadcast their location, right? You probably don’t have cell service while out and about planting weapons on massacred civilians.

[embedding-shape]

Typically you'd record your run with GPS, no need for cell service, sync it to your devices occasionally and that's when it might be uploaded, or later.

[efitz]

Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

[manquer]

Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.

Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.

We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.

[xp84]

Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.

[nradov]

Risky for what? It's just a bit of fun. Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.

[Terr_]

It doesn't need to be anything nearly that dramatic as assassins, because economies of scale both lower the bar and make most attacks impersonal. Consider how odd it would be for someone in 2025 to say: "Computer security?I haven't done anything to personally offend a genius hacker."

Imagine this data going to a burglar, who has a digital dashboard of nearby one-person properties and when the owner is likely to be out, able to act with confidence they can leave before the victim could return.

Sure, sophisticated international hitmen won't have any interest in catching you in ambush... but that doesn't make you safe from a local rapist of opportunity.

[dylan604]

> Most of us aren't being pursued by stalkers or assassins.

Most of us, but for those that are...

However, in the world we live in today, the various LEOs are using this type of data to find people they do not like. It's getting to the point that I pine for the days of good ol' 1985 where you could just be another anonymous person in public with no tracking of your every move.

[Forgeties79]

No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default, so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt in most of the time

[embedding-shape]

Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.

[ebergen]

For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.

[dkga]

Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.

[alexfoo]

Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose.

a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.)

b) Sharing and socialising some other activities.

You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes.

Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.

[roywiggins]

imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory

[iamacyborg]

> and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that

Which is weird, because if they bought a Garmin device, they already have all that built in.

[embedding-shape]

Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?

[iamacyborg]

Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin.

The social stuff is nice though.

[LightBug1]

I agree with you ... but gotdamned if I don't see another unasked-for shared workout stat.

I have the family exercise group on mute, lol

[bigfatkitten]

Ships often have welfare networks, basically vanilla internet access for people to use to keep in touch with their families etc while deployed.