I have friends on there, and have added people I’ve seen on workouts. The latter is especially common with group bike rides. You get to know each other and people comment on each other’s workouts. If you have a bad workout, people will chime in and give support, same for a particularly good workout. Also neat to see where friends are running or new routes they’ve done lately. It’s also fun to try to get new course records, or KOMs if cycling (the running equivalent of a running course record). Strava has been in the news a lot in the years since I’ve been using it on fitness (running, cycling, triathlon) forums because occasionally someone will do something dangerous in an attempt to get a course record, like running red lights through a busy intersection, and blame strava. There has also been once or twice I did see theft of very expensive bikes in the news from strava data.
It isn’t what keeps me running, or cycling, but it’s a definite motivator. I’m happy to be a part of the community and happy to pay for premium, though I don’t use that many premium features. I do love the personal heat map premium feature though, it’s basically what this news article is about, but just your workouts. It makes me actively try to fill out more of the city on my heatmap.
Can you give more details on this? I can't find much in the app.
And as he admits, you're far more likely to lose your bike to a combination of a moment of carelessness and an opportunistic thief than someone that's surveilling you through your social network activity.
It's a little ironic too that he's writing about the dangers of deanonymization while providing enough information in his post to figure out his Strava username and approximate location.