Strava
What is Strava?
Strava records running, cycling, swimming, and other activities, often using GPS. It combines training statistics with social features such as followers, comments, kudos, clubs, challenges, and local segments.
Age limit: People over 13 may create an account. Users under 16 cannot upload heart-rate data or receive heart-rate analysis. That health-data rule applies globally, and EU data-protection law influenced the decision. [1]
New accounts for under-18 users receive a more protective set of defaults. These controls sit on the athlete’s account rather than a linked parent dashboard, and the user can later change most of them. [2]
Why do kids like it?
- Progress is visible. Distance, pace, and personal records make improvement easy to see.
- Friends can encourage each other. Kudos, comments, and clubs add a social layer to training.
- Routes and challenges create goals. Activities can feel like part of a larger competition or community.
- Wearables sync automatically. A watch or bike computer can upload an activity with little effort.
What are the real risks?
- Routes can reveal routines and places. Repeated routes, times, photos, and club activity may identify a home, school, or training place even when a start and end are hidden, and a hidden location can still be deduced from other information. [3]
- Social settings can change. Qualifying under-18 accounts start with profile, activity, group-activity, and mention visibility limited to followers, but most of those settings can later be widened. [2]
- Local competition increases visibility. Public activities and segments can connect a person to a particular place and time.
- Followers may not be known offline. A follow request can come from someone the child has never met, and approving it shares activity and place detail with them.
Settings to check
For qualifying under-18 accounts, Strava defaults profile and activities to Followers, hides the first and last 400 metres, disables Flyby, messaging, and Instant Workouts, and excludes activities from some community features. These are age-based defaults, not universal settings for every account. [2]
- Review activity visibility: Open Settings → Privacy Controls → Activities, and choose Followers or Only You for future activities. Check older activities separately. [2]
- Review the follower list: Open Profile → Followers, remove unfamiliar accounts, and review new requests before approval. [2]
- Adjust map visibility: Open Settings → Privacy Controls → Map Visibility. Strava allows hiding a start/end area, a portion of every future route, or the entire map. [3]
- Check individual maps: Open an activity → More (
…) → Edit Map Visibility. An activity-specific choice overrides the account default. [3] - Keep Flyby off when local exposure is unwanted: Open Settings → Privacy Controls → Flyby, and confirm the choice. It defaults to No One for qualifying under-18 accounts. [2]
- Review clubs, photos, and mentions: Check whether they reveal a school, team, regular time, or recognisable location even when the route is partly hidden.
- Review connected services: Open Settings → Manage Apps and Devices, and remove apps or wearables that are no longer used. [4]
How to talk about it
“What could someone learn if they compared several of your routes and times?”
“How do you decide who gets to follow your training?”
“Which activities feel good to share, and which would you rather keep only for yourself?”
Last reviewed: September 2026