Rowing Analytics

On November 19th, 2024, we have received an email from Strava on “updates to privacy for connected apps on Strava”. Here’s a summary of the changes:

1. Third party apps are no longer able to display your Strava activity data on their surfaces to other users;
2. Strava are updating their terms to prohibit third parties from using any data obtained via Strava’s API in artificial intelligence models or similar applications;
3. Strava are prohibiting third parties from processing or disclosing Strava data … for the purposes of, including but not limited to, analytics, analyses;

If you want to know the details, read the full post on Strava community hub.

Rowsandall.com offers the option to import your workout data from Strava to your account on Rowsandall.com. This is useful, because there are many devices and apps used by our users, and almost all of them offer export to Strava. Rowsandall.com has functionality to share your data with coaches (and you are in full control on which data you share with them, and can stop sharing at any point in time). Rowsandall.com offers functionality to do analysis on your data, and the way Strava has formulated their updated terms can be interpreted in a way that even prohibits calculating how many kilometers or minutes you spent cycling, including the minutes and kilometers imported through the Strava API.

Rowsandall.com is a very small business and we have to take a conservative interpretation of the new Strava terms, even though there seem to be others who get the green light to show data to coaches. We will continue to monitor the developments around this and may change behavior in the future, depending on how the Strava terms and their communication around it evolves.

We are implementing the following changes, which we plan to push before December 15th, 2024:

• All workout data imported from Strava will be set to “private” on importing and automated export to other sites will not be applied to these data.
• These workouts are already marked with “strava” as the workout data source.
• As “private” workouts, they will not be visible to your coaches and team members.
• As workouts with “strava” as the workout source, these workouts will be excluded in any functionality accessible on the “Analysis” page.
• Going forward, you will not be able to use data imported from Strava for our our Courses and Challenges functionality.
• Workout summary data are already taken unprocessed from Strava, so we will continue to show these data to the user (but not to coaches or other team members).

Note that these changes only affect data imported through the Strava API (Strava Import). Any other way of getting data directly on Rowsandall are completely unaffected. Also, exporting data originating from Rowsandall.com to Strava is unchanged (although we have contemplated sending an email to Strava with our updated terms).

As we are a platform for rowers (and by rowers), the core indoor and on-the-water rowing data can easily be imported to Rowsandall from popular places such as Concept2, RP3, Nielsen-Kellerman, ActiveTools, CrewNerd, RowingCoach, PocketCox, and others. We also support direct uploads of CSV, TCX and FIT files. We will continue to work with all serious rowing apps and devices to make integration easy and seamless.

And remember, they are your data, and we will always treat them as such.