How Does Strava Use My Synced Contacts and Connections?

You can choose to provide information from your phone's contact book to Strava. Here is how we use that information.

Strava Beacon is a feature that lets you share your live location, tracked in the Strava app, with your chosen safety contacts. To designate safety contacts, you will need to allow Strava to access your phone’s contact book and choose the contacts you want to share Beacon information with. Strava will send an SMS message to your safety contact’s number with a link to view your live location via a webpage when you start Beacon during an activity.

Removing Strava’s access to your contact book does not automatically remove your Beacon safety contacts. You can manage your Beacon safety contacts by selecting Beacon from the Settings menu.

We also promote Strava's community experience through social connections. When you permit Strava to access your phone’s contact book, we store your contact book to suggest users you can follow and give you an easy way to invite your contacts to join Strava:

When you provide your phone's address book to Strava, Strava stores your entire list of address book connections and displays them in two ways. First, on our "Find Friends" page under the Contacts tab, we show you your address book contacts who are on Strava so you can easily follow them. We do this by identifying any other Strava athletes whose Strava account email address or phone number is contained in the phone address book you provided to Strava.

Second, on our "Find Friends" page in the Strava mobile app, you'll also find a list of your contacts who aren't Strava members. You may choose whether to invite any of them to join Strava using a method you choose, or by having Strava send the email on your behalf. If you choose to have Strava email your contacts who aren't Strava members, we include the option for those contacts to unsubscribe from further email correspondence from Strava.

Suggested follows are athletes we think you may know based on the information you've provided to us from your phone's address book, or based on inferences about who your mutual friends are. For example, if Athlete A and Athlete B both follow Athlete C but don't follow each other, we'd suggest that Athlete A follow Athlete B, and vice versa. Or, if Athlete A syncs her phone's address book with Strava and it includes the email address or phone number associated with Athlete B, we may suggest to both Athletes A and B that they follow each other.

We promote "Suggested follows" in the Strava feed, on the "Find Friends" page under the Suggested Follows tab, and via email.

Suggested follows are generated for you even if you haven't synced your own address book. If the email address or phone number associated with your Strava account is present in the address book connections of another Strava athlete who chooses to provide their address book to Strava, we will suggest that you follow this athlete.

If you're registered to Strava with an email address that's in the address book of someone who has synced their address book to Strava, we'll notify that person that you're on Strava, and we may suggest that they follow you.

When an athlete grants Strava access to their contact book, Strava accesses and uploads names, emails, and phone numbers from the contact book. Until a user changes this access permission, Strava will regularly sync the contact book (for example, once every seven days) when a user opens the app. This information may include users of Strava, as well as contacts who are not users of Strava or do not have an account (“Non-Users”).

The way Strava uses this information depends on why a Strava user has granted access to their contact book:

In addition to the purposes described above, Strava may use or share Non-User information if we are required to for legal reasons like responding to a legal request or litigation and regulatory matters; if reasonably necessary to prevent death, serious bodily injury, or other significant harm; to address issues of national security or other issues of public importance; to prevent or detect violations of our Terms or fraud or abuse of Strava or its users; to protect our operations or our property or other legal rights, including in connection with actual or potential litigation; and with Strava subsidiaries for the purposes described above. Strava retains Non-User information for as long as needed to fulfill these purposes.

We process this information based on our and our users’ legitimate interests, including to provide our services and help our users connect.

Non-Users may exercise their rights under applicable laws by contacting us at [email protected]. You can learn more about privacy rights that may apply and Strava’s Privacy Policy here.

There currently is not an option to remove suggested follows in its entirety from the feed at this time.

You can remove your contact book connections from being processed by Strava by visiting the Contacts Permission menu from the Settings page in the mobile app. Please note that removing Strava’s access to your contact book does not automatically remove your Beacon safety contacts. You can manage your Beacon safety contacts by selecting Beacon from the Settings menu.

Use the 'X' in the top right corner of a card for a suggestion in the feed module if you wish to remove a suggested follow. This is not permanent and will only remove the suggestion for 28 days.

Beacon does not use your address book for any purpose other than sending a safety message to your contacts. Please refer to the section above titled "Other Ways You Can See Your Connections" to learn more about how we suggest friends using information that other athletes have provided.