Activities from Strava will soon only be visible to the athlete that performed the activity, not to their coaches or followers and not via intervals.icu API. This is a new addition to the Strava API terms and conditions. I plan to make this change from the 1st of December.
I know a lot of people use Strava to get activities from Zwift into Intervals.icu. The good news is that direct Intervals.icu Zwift integration (planned workouts and completed activities) is almost complete!
If you are coaching someone on Intervals.icu and they are using Strava then you need to get them to setup direct Intervals.icu integration as soon as possible.
This is what I received from Strava:
In our efforts to further fortify trust and safety within our community, developers will no longer be permitted to expose user data that is obtained via our API within their app to any party outside of that user.
Your app has been identified as now being in conflict with the updated terms and in order for your application to be compliant, we ask that you:
Make the necessary updates to your app with regards to your Strava integration such that any future Strava data is only accessible to the authenticated user who provides such data.
Update the visibility of all historic Strava data within your application such that any data is only visible to the authenticated user who provided that data.
Notify users of your application of such changes to the extent required by your Privacy Policy, our API Agreement, or applicable law.
We ask that you kindly make these updates within the next 30 days in order to be compliant with our updated terms.
Does this mean that existing activities imported into âintervals.icuâ from Strava will be âŚremoved from âintervals.icuâ?
Itâs getting more and more difficult with this Strava. A few weeks ago they cut out all content containing links to e.g. YT, to events - even those within Strava itself
In one sense, this is a step in the right direction from Strava, but true to their recent form, they have also gone several steps in the wrong direction at the same time. They donât seem to be able to land in the happy middle these days.
Right now itâs possible to see private Strava activities of my friends in Intervals, as in activities that they have set to fully private in Strava. This is not a good thing for a number of very obvious reasons.
But if Stravaâs change here is only to protect users from their private activities being visible (and I doubt it is their sole intention), then the best course of action would be to not serve private activity data via API. Job done. They could, perhaps, require that users approve the sharing of private activity data when linking a 3rd party service to Strava or further break down the permissions structure. Itâs common for users to select from several check boxes to customize the level of data sharing they approve when linking accounts.
Alternately they could require the third party to not show private activities to anyone but the user, or even allow the user to toggle visibility of these activities to others in the 3rd party app ( though these 2 are much more work to enforce for Strava). A simple flag for activity visibility status in Strava would make quick work for all (this probably already exists).
Instead, Strava is making a drastic change they know will significantly affect their users. While privacy & protection of their users might be their public explanation, you have to wonder if this isnât just a justification for nerfing 3rd party app usefulness in an attempt to lock users into the Strava ecosystem, and try to sell more premium subscriptions. Maybe Strava wants to eventually launch a feature for coaches?
Strava knows that their analysis, even for premium users, is pretty shallow and useless for serious athletes. Intervals is absolutely kicking the ass of everything else out there, which is why Iâm more than happy to pay to support it and have zero desire to pay for Strava ever again. I canât help but feel that Strava is feeling pressure to stop sharing data for free from their VC investors, and is taking the opportunity here to try and hurt the competition. Shades of Reddit nerfing their APIâŚ
Pretty draconian move by Strava, and a reminder that no one truly owns any data they share with a social media company. They can cut off your access whenever they please.
The tl;dr: Starting December 1st, all of your activities imported to Intervals from Strava via API, both in the past and going forward, will only be visible to you (the athlete who performed the activity and who approved data sharing between Strava and Intervals). Your Intervals.icu followers, and coaches, will no longer be able to see your Strava activities.
I would assume that manual imports of âStrava dataâ wouldnât be affected by this change. E.g. downloading a fit file from Strava, then importing that fit file manually via the import function in Intervals.
Everybody is complaining, but who is using Strava (app) to record an activity??? No serious athlete (I assume intervals.icu makes sense only for serious athlete, as non serious ones are not interested in data analysis) use Strava (app) for recording, IMHO. They use some fitness device (bike computer, runnersâ watch, etc.) and they only upload to Strava.
So, the solution is to instead of syncing from Strava everybody should sync from the true, original data source: from Garmin, from Wahoo, from Polar, etcâŚ
@david Many athletes use GPS from brands that are not yet in intervals (Bryton, Xoss, IGPSPORT and others), how could this data be synchronized to intervals.icu, other than manually? And does the intervals schedule add these brands here? It would be excellent, considering that these brands integrate with Training Peaks.
Excuse my ignorance, but for example, if you export from your device (Garmin or any other) to Strava, and from Strava to Intervals.icu, in theory they could not impose this limitation, since the data is already coming from another third-party service server.
I think the only limitation they could impose is the activities generated by their own application.
And another detail, after the activity is in the Intervals.icu database, how does Strava know whether or not you are displaying the data to other users? How does it know if the activity data came from Strava or another service?
True! The bulk of my workouts are on a bike, and thus recorded with a head unit â so I have access to the final .FIT file which can by synced to just about any platform. I do also record workouts with my Apple Watch. This may be old news, but for those not aware, there is a really nice app called HealthFit which will sync Apple Fitness activities (such as yoga and weight training) with most of the popular tracking platforms, including intervals. And HealthFit can also import into Apple Fitness too; so I can import the .FIT file recorded from my Karoo bike computer into Apple Health.
So yes, currently an extra step to push an activity from an Apple Watch to Intervals using HealthFit â which can be automated â but I feel a bit easier than using Strava as the conduit to between the two.
I would very much like to integrate with as many platforms as possible. Unfortunately many (most?) of them do not have a âcloud APIâ than I can call. The integrations are built into the app for the device and so they have to do the development. So it is question of âis Intervals.icu popular enoughâ. If anyone has any contacts at these companies, please connect me (david@intervals.icu) if you can. It is very simple to upload completed activities to the Intervals.icu API.
For things that integrate with Apple Health, HealthFit is a good option. Hopefully more things integrate with Google Health and someone will do a similar Android app.
Unfortunately not. Intervals.icu uses the Strava API which is where this restriction is coming from.
What would be an automated option for those who use these brands (xoss, . IGP, bryton) to have the data arriving at INTERVALS, without having to manually upload it?
Well my premium subscription to Strava ends in a few days and was thinking about not renewing it as I have had zero interest in any âenhancementsâ to the platform over the last 12 months. (their Athlete Intelligence is a complete joke which is wearing pretty thin now)
This latest incomprehensible move has tipped me over into definitely not re-subscribing.
I think Strava just shot themselves in the foot.
The only reason I was using it in the first place was as middleware between Zwift and i.icu â never cared about segments or the social aspects of that platform â canât imagine I was the only one.
Live segments
There was also the great FlyBy - but they basically butchered it.
The identical explanation at the time was: security and user privacy.
And it is known that this coincided with events that USArmy soldiers on missions were running around and recording activities but did not have the knowledge to designate âhidden zonesâ for themselves
I am almost in the same situation, except that my âPremiumâ ends in three months.
If nothing has changed by then, I will also discontinue my subscription.
The only thing keeping me at Strava is the âLive Segmentsâ.
Well - life is a string of constant choices
I meant to say âwouldnât be affectedâ
is a complete joke which is wearing pretty thin now)