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Strava closes the gates to sharing fitness data with other apps (www.theverge.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 3 weeks ago (8 children)

Effective November 11, the updated API agreement introduces three key changes that provide Strava users with greater control, security, and a consistent experience: 

Stronger Privacy Standards: Third-party apps may now only display a user’s Strava activity data to that specific user. Users will continue to have access to their personal Strava data across apps connected to our platform, though there may be differences in how this data appears.

Data Use Limitations: Our terms now explicitly prohibit third parties from using any data obtained via Strava’s API in artificial intelligence models or similar applications.

Protecting the Strava Experience: Additional terms have been added to protect Strava’s unique look and feel and functionality, helping users easily distinguish between Strava and third-party platforms.

Not that I use Strava or think anyone should, but the title is misleading no? It still allows third-party apps to still show you your own personal data and bans third-party apps from using that data in any machine learning.

[–] Meltrax 60 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

I use Strava a ton. This update sucks.

Strava has positioned themselves as two things:

Social media for fitness
Data aggregator with a nice API

So there are a lot of people, like myself, who bike and use a Wahoo bike computer, or bike inside on Zwift, or run outside with a Garmin or Apple watch, and push all those activities to Strava because everything integrates with it.

Then, if you want to, you can easily tap into all that data with another platform like TrainingPeaks or Intervals.icu (I bike more than run but there are more for runners). These platforms do really fun data analytics that Strava doesn't provide, and also have coaching integrations so your coaches can log in and you can authorize them to see your workout results, which helps them build plans for you.

Two changes from this update fuck up everything:

Strava data can't be shared with anyone by a third party app. Even if I want to allow it. I can't opt in to share my own data with people I deem appropriate. So my coach can no longer see anything about my activities.
Data pulled from Strava can't be processed in any way. At all. This isn't talking about feeding random AI models. Platforms like Intervals.icu, which is run by one guy and just provides lots of useful algorithms and graphs of fitness trends, now can't do anything if your data comes from Strava. Strava is not implementing anything on their end to replace these. They're just removing the ability to use implementations made by others.

In short, as a guy who likes training and tracking my fitness, this breaks everything for me. Many many people who casually run or bike or swim or whatever will be in the same boat as me. This sucks.

EDIT:

They have framed this as a user protection. It isn't. No one could see my data that I hadn't provided explicit permission for via the third party app of my choosing, after voluntarily entering my own API key.

What this does do is likely set them up to offer a paid API in a few months, so everything that is free and has been free since it's inception will now cost these third party applications per-request to retrieve. Which is bullshit, because this data is not Strava's - it's mine.

This on the heels of their shitty AI summary bot experiment which was not opt-in but opt-out. There's a 0% chance Strava built their own AI LLM so even while they're shutting out access I explicitly invited, they're piping all my workout data, including any activities I mark as private, straight over to OpenAI without my explicit consent unless I go through the effort to opt out.

[–] eodur 4 points 3 weeks ago

I love all strava's social elements, but it has just gotten worse and worse over time. We really need a federated alternative. I've been toying with concepts for a while, even made a bridge from Garmin to mastodon API, but the long term concern for me is that Garmin seems to be picky with official API access so it would be difficult for individual servers to import data from there or other sources.

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