The running season is in full swing across the Northern Hemisphere. The mild spring weather right before the summer heat has brought a lot of runners back outside for the first time in months, or in my case, years. Unsurprisingly, fitness apps that track your workouts have risen in popularity as well. Strava, in particular, has taken social media by storm, with many people sharing their personal records on Instagram.

While everyone is busy logging their runs on Strava, I quickly realized that the app was logging and sharing far more data than I was comfortable with, which is why I’ve switched to a free, open-source alternative.

I didn’t mind Strava’s clutter until I started thinking about what my running data actually reveals

Running outdoors shouldn’t come at the cost of privacy

One of the biggest issues with Strava is how it handles privacy and data out of the box. The app is built around its social features, so when you create an account, your profile and activities are set to be visible to everyone by default. On top of that, it’s cluttered with a range of privacy options that can be confusing to navigate, with some requiring you to opt out manually, making it easy to accidentally share more than you intended.

A fresh account can have profile visibility, activity feeds, group activities, heatmaps, and other personal information set to public. The Flyby feature in particular made headlines a few years ago because it could map out strangers who crossed paths during workouts.

A more recent example is how starting a run at home is handled. The starting point isn’t hidden by default, so if you begin tracking your workout before leaving your house, anyone using the app can effectively infer where you live if you haven’t configured your privacy settings. You might think this could never happen to you, but it’s surprisingly easy to miss.

This kind of self-doxing becomes especially problematic if you’ve linked Strava to another app connected to your fitness tracker and have it set up to automatically start tracking workouts when it detects activity. This is how my friend ended up sharing the location of his house with everyone through his Samsung Galaxy Watch.

Brand

Samsung

Operating System

Wear OS

Now thinner and more comfortable, the Galaxy Watch 8 adds new health-tracking features like sleep apnea detection and antioxidant readings. Just be mindful about privacy settings when connecting it to third-party apps like Strava!

Want another example? There have been several reported instances of military personnel accidentally exposing sensitive locations.

Another gripe I personally have with Strava is how the app feels to use. It’s messy, confusing, and cluttered, much like its privacy menus. It took me a while just to figure out where my runs were saved, because the app is filled with distractions that constantly push free users toward a premium subscription with repeated prompts to start a trial.

But I don’t want this article to just be me poking holes in Strava and how it handles personal data. I also want to talk about the much better, privacy-focused alternative I’ve found.

FitoTrack gives me everything Strava does, but without the baggage

All the same basic data, just stripped down

Credit: Joe Fedewa / How-To Geek

FitoTrack is an incredibly simple app, and I mean that in the best way possible. It’s a free, open-source, completely ad-free fitness tracker that covers all the basics while keeping your data private and offline.

There’s no account, no cloud, or anything like that. It doesn’t have any of Strava’s social features, but if we’re being honest, most of us only use Strava to generate nice-looking GPS routes and key activity stats to collect brownie points (or “aura,” as the youngsters call it) on Instagram.

With FitoTrack, you can achieve pretty much the same result, but the key difference is that your data is logged only on your phone. This also means you need to make frequent backups if you don’t want to lose your data, but it’s a worthwhile trade-off.

Using the app to track your runs is incredibly simple, and there are still a fair number of things you can configure about its behavior. One of the coolest features is the ability to start and stop workouts by scanning an NFC tag.

There’s also a voice announcement feature that gives you automatic auditory updates on a schedule, along with pace warnings if you’re going too slow or too fast. This makes it easy to keep track of your current performance without relying on wearables or having to interrupt your run to check your phone.

Another aspect where FitoTrack surprised me is just how much data it’s able to track. Despite its apparent simplicity, the app covers 99.9% of the nerdy running stats anyone could wish for. You’ve got all the basics like start and end time, duration, pace, average and top speed, estimated calories burned, split times, and more. The icing on the cake is the detailed and accurate GPS route powered by OpenStreetMap.

I’ve used the app to track my run today, and I’m honestly hard-pressed to find a single major flaw. It’s pretty much just like Strava without the social aspect and privacy concerns.

Self-hosting a fitness dashboard on my home server ties it all together

A unified view that’s under my control

Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek

One of the coolest things I like about FitoTrack is just how easy it is to export my activity data as a GPX file. It didn’t take me long to figure out a way to take advantage of that, which ended up being a fitness dashboard I can self-host on my home server: Endurain.

Endurain’s mobile app is still a work in progress, but it works well with other fitness tracking apps. If you’ve used multiple fitness apps over the years and are concerned about losing your data, Endurain gives you an easy way to unify it all under one roof. This is how I was able to merge my new FitoTrack data with my old Strava runs.

The cool thing about Endurain is that it’s actually designed to serve as a self-hosted drop-in replacement for Strava. You can create profiles and share your activity publicly, but you have full control over who is allowed to connect to your home server. I keep my Endurain strictly on my LAN; in other words, it acts like a mini Strava server for just my household.

You don’t need Strava when there are plenty of privacy-focused alternatives

If you think FitoTrack looks and feels a bit outdated, or you notice it’s missing a feature you love about Strava, but you still want a privacy-first fitness tracking app, I’m happy to report that FitoTrack is far from the only option. Plenty of other privacy-oriented alternatives offer similar levels of functionality but promise to keep your information private, such as RunnerUp, Trackbook, and OpenTracks.