The Infamous Strava Heatmap (and why it's fun)

Strava Labs produces a map showing the activities and locations of users of their fitness app.  It was last updated in November of 2017, but it has found its way into the news this week after a Twitter user realized that the data on the map can give away the location of sensitive locations such as military bases and the fitness and patrol routes of people inside the base wearing fitness trackers.

Certainly there is something here that the military needs to consider when it comes to data security, but I feel like the story as reported in the media has been blown out of proportion to some degree.

That said, I'm glad that the media spotlight has fallen on this website, because as map geek there's a lot here to see and explore.

The software filters out car rides and airplane rides by speed, so the result is a map showing where someone has walked, run, cycled, swam, etc. while wearing a fitness tracker.  Parks, trails, and any place with high pedestrian traffic jumps out right away.

Zooming in at the area around our home office, there are three things that jump out at me right away:

1) Summit Mall - you can see the interior walkways of the mall
2) Croghan Park - the footpath which circles around the park is lit up
3) Sand Run Parkway - this road is a popular walking and jogging path, which opens up into a dedicated footpath in the park itself

There are all sorts of interesting things to find on the map.  Here are a few things I found after a little exploring:

You can see the kayak (and possibly swim?) paths of people crossing Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawai'i to get to the Captain Cook Monument.

Looking at an overview of the Columbus area, I'm struck by how much the map is just showing where fitness tracker users are.  The northwest quadrant of the city, which is more affluent, is lit up much more than the northeast, and you could pretty much draw the city limits of Bexley based solely on this data.

Here's Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, a place I'm hoping to walk around myself a few times this year.

dormant.uprooting.premiums

Time will tell if the idea will take off, but I think the universal addressing/mapping system created by what3words is really fascinating.

The idea is simple and elegant - the world is divided into 3m x 3m squares, and each square is given a three-word code to describe it.

This makes addresses easier to remember than a latitude/longitude and more precise than a normal street address.  Much of the world has no street addresses at all, and even in developed countries, street addresses are unreliable outside of urban areas, and not particularly precise inside of them.

The address of our main office is:

173 Owosso Ave
Fairlawn, OH 44333-3724

But the corresponding what3words address would be:

dormant.uprooting.premiums

Which not only directs to the office, but directly to the front door.  With a 3m grid, you can actually specify particular doors or entrances.

Our old office was a multi-unit building, and edges.breed.icon would have taken you straight to the front door.

I'm really impressed at the level of thought that's gone into the system - addresses are available in multiple languages, using simple words, with more common or shorter words in areas with higher populations.  Addresses with similar word combinations are intentionally far away from each other.

You can use the web map to find the address for any location:

https://map.what3words.com/

NCAA Fan Map

This is an older map, but college football season is approaching and this map is a favorite of mine.

The New York Times used the volume of Facebook "likes" for each ZIP code to put together a map of college football fandom.

Ohio State fans, similar to Wisconsin and Arkansas, pretty much form a contiguous block in their respective state.  Others are much more divided.

I was in in Fort Wayne, Indiana, recently, and was surprised to see a sports bar with Ohio State, Michigan State, and Indiana University flags flying out front.  I would have expected to see Purdue or even maybe Michigan flags; and looking at the map, appears that Notre Dame fans make up the majority of the Fort Wayne area, followed by Purdue and then Ohio State, so I suspect that particular bar was a bit of a unique outlier.

Still, there are plenty of Michigan fans in Toledo, Ohio University and West Virginia fans in Southeast Ohio, and University of Cincinnati and University of Kentucky fans in the Cincinnati area.

As always, with an interactive map like this, the real fun is zooming in and looking closely at specific areas.