ALL fellow riders using strava

I urge you all to check your security settings if you ride from home,
Me and a few mates have been targeted and the bikes have been stolen two days ago as a result of tracking our gps to our homes, if you look at one of your old rides and use satellite image, it will take you too your door, please please all urgently if you havent already, set the safety parameter around your home.

IF any would be Scrotes wish to try this again, you will never use your legs again !

Oh, and don’t let all your mates ride to yours and set off from there as people will see their tracks converging on your house as it’ll be outside their exclusion zones…

Me and a few mates have been targeted and the bikes have been stolen two days ago as a result of tracking our gps to our homes, if you look at one of your old rides and use satellite image, it will take you too your door, please please all urgently if you havent already, set the safety parameter around your home.

Sorry to hear about the thefts.
How do you know that they used strava?

Thats why i deleted it within a week of getting it you just lead everyone to your house if you do local rides 🙁

It was only a matter of time….

Endomondo has no similar facility to hide locations so make sure your privacy settings are set so that joe public can’t see your tracks/location.

How do you know they they used strava to locate you?

Thought it was a a KOM thread

Strava has a privacy function where you can “hide” certain locations. Think it’s a 1km radius from a specified point. Switched-on scrotes could still work out a riding pattern though and know whereabouts to loiter to follow you home.

Happened to a lad in our roadie club. The police said there were others in the area and the common factor was strava.

Gutted for you

But I know this sounds harsh (sorry I don’t want it to!) but thought it was common sense not to start it from your home for this reason?!

How long to insurance companies cotton on and refuse to pay due to this

I’ve just realised why I never get a time on the segment up my road…yes privacy is on.

Switched-on scrotes could still work out a riding pattern though and know whereabouts to loiter to follow you home.

It’s true.

My local mtb club meet at the same car park every week at the same time. Someone could wait there and follow people home. No need for gps.

In the end it’s about minimising risk, you can’t remove it.

I’ve set a scatter of zones near my house on Strava so there isn’t a ‘centre’ that people can spot.

The police said there were others in the area and the common factor was strava.

Other common factors being they all had bikes and they lived in the local area.

Just press the start button outside your next-door neighbours. Problem solved 🙂

How do you know that they used strava?

Unless he nicked the bikes he doesn’t

Privacy zones as advocated by Strava themselves will help. Along with not leaving bikes on show, washing them out front, riding in and out of your house, posting photos online, and going to popular biking places etc.

Before I binned Strava, I set the centre of the exclusion zone not at my house, but at a convenient location a few streets away.

Either way, all my rides start at a local landmark, not my house.

And if they follow me home they’ll find a bike storage with 20 bikes, none of which are mine. And a handful more chained up to the bike racks outside.

posting photos online

Make sure you’ve turned of any GPS geotagging thingy on your iphone too, if you ever take pics at home, and post them to farcebook/flickr/picasaweb/…

There do seem to be quite a few ‘check out my $$$ road bike’ types on Strava who seem to be actively advertising their bikes to thieves.

I reality, so long as you have the privacy zones set up and don’t post photos or the actual model names of your bikes (I just have, ’29er, road bike, trail bike & hack bike’)and take care who sees you coming and going on your posher rides you’re taking reasonable precautions.

There’s a balance to be struck between security and living your life.

I keep three identical bikes in different locations in fireproof safes.
I use them each in a random order and use a different route to get there every time.
Also I travel to the locations using a variety of different methods of transport (bus/train/bike/car/walk/hovercraft/hot air balloon/donkey etc)
I use a variety of disguises while riding the bikes so nobody can recognise me.
And I never use credit cards/debit cards or mobile phones when out riding just in case I am being tracked.

You can’t be too careful 😉

I had my privacy setting set as an exclusion zone around home. But I’ve just created a few more using random postcodes in areas not too far away from home. That should do it 😀

Log it as a run…

Sorry to hear about this. However you can easily set “privacy zones” in Strava which hide your route within a 1/4mile radius. I have my home address, work & parents address set up like this. Just type in postcode.

Yet another reason to not use Strava…

Also.. set your profile private and only follow your friends.

or to read the instructions

Yet another reason to not use Strava…

Not really. If you use the privacy zones, I don’t see any danger in it. I think that the correlation between thefts and Strava use is probably just because people who are really into biking are more likely to a) have nice bikes and b) use Strava.

Of course if you’re really paranoid you can set everything to private – you’ll still be able to use segments, etc, but only against yourself.

And I thought I was paranoid! I use Strava* and have never had a bike stolen, that’s as statisticaly relavent as the OP.

*privacy turned on, my postcode and one further down the road blocked.

Yet another reason to not use Strava…

The others being….?

The others being….?

The joy you get from self congratulatory ejactulations every time it gets mentioned.

The others being….?

Being unfit, missplaced moral superiority and smugness, not owning a GPS or smartphone would make it pretty useless too.

I have my home address, work & parents address set up like this. Just type in postcode.

Or better, put in a different postcode a few streets away so the exclusion zone isn’t centred on your house.

Has anybody actually heard of a thief who said they used Strava to target victims, or is this just another urban legend?

If I had farm with a nice barn I would dig a massive pit and cover it with tarpaulin. I will then post a bike check saying my bike is gold plated and have all the routes end at the barn and catch me a few of these guys. It puts the lotion on it’s skin.

Yep, Strava is terrible, you should all stop using it! (All the more KOMs for me 🙂 )

You really should have turned the damn app on once away from home yeah?

Gutted for you however.

Yep, Strava is terrible, you should all stop using it! (All the more KOMs for me )

Already done 🙂

Log it as a run…

That ought to mix up the KoM stuff a bit 😈

Are thieves actually scrolling through Strava finding local segments, tracing back through rides and searching for users or is it a bit of internet scaremongering/urban myth?

Start/finish your rides at a “non-home” location – ideally somewhere pretty open like a junction or town centre where it’s impossible to pinpoint one house or one road.

Don’t Strava your commute, it sets up a regular pattern of where you’ll be at what time.

Don’t publish the name of your bike – call it “road bike” or something instead of “my amazing £7000 Cervelo”

Don’t have all your mates starting their rides from outside your house.

Similar to any internet activity surely, just keep at least some degree of privacy in terms of who you allow to follow you, who can see your pictures etc.

One thing that occurred to me that might be handy for scallywags would be a search like this:

http://app.strava.com/activities/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&location=Wylam%2C+England%2C+United+Kingdom&%5Bcountry%5D=United+Kingdom&%5Bstate%5D=England&%5Bcity%5D=Wylam&%5Blat_lng%5D=54.97812%2C-1.8272120000000314&keywords=new+bike&activity_type=Ride&type=&distance_start=0&distance_end=300&time_start=0&time_end=10&elev_gain_start=0&elev_gain_end=5000

If you buy a new bike, maybe don’t publish that in your activity name.

glupton1976 – Member

Log it as a run…
then they would nick your shoes.

Thanks to all the comments, some useful.

pobably a little unrealistic to record as a ride, with some sections hitting 30mph, but nice thought.

Too little has been done around these thefts, and will be more common place between now and christmas.
Its time to do something about it

OK, I understand your annoyance, but apart from a Daily Wail style headline what?
Do you know it was Strava related? Do you want strava shut down? Privacy zones are easy to apply and mask a lot.
There are many ways that people can scope that you have expensive bikes, I have friends who were followed from trails etc. Another example was where someone nicked the Save the FC petition from a bike trial head with names and addresses of all the people who signed it.

The issue of bike theft needs addressing.

Its time to do something about it

any specific suggestions?

like cars, the only solution I can see to bicycle theft is to make it so much effort that the thieves decide to pick something else that’s easier to nick.