Women, safety and fitness apps: why your launch spot shouldn't be public

Paddleboarding has more women in it than any other paddlesport: 58% of paddleboarders are women in the latest US figures. It is also built on the same public-by-default tracking that women have spent years warning about. A route you share is a routine anyone can read: where you go, when, and from which front door.

When the novelist Peter James wrote a thriller about a stalker who tracks a runner through an app, he did not invent the premise. His wife Lara had lived it. After she waved at a stranger on a run, the man began running her routes, then followed her on Strava. 'I was scared,' she said, 'but also curious about how much information I was giving away on the app. It wouldn't take much before you could look up someone's patterns of when they run, where they live, when they're away.' A paddle log is the same kind of information.

In 2017, the journalist Rosie Spinks called fitness-app privacy 'a feminist issue' after a stranger 'liked' her workout despite the stricter privacy settings she had already turned on. She wrote as someone whose 'personal and digital space is invaded with alarming regularity'. The reporting since has a shorthand for it, the 'Strava stalker' who uses accidentally-public data to follow a woman home. Sport England's research found six in ten women worry about harassment when they exercise in the evening. Public-by-default tracking turns that worry into a map.

The fix is tools where privacy is the default, not a setting you have to hunt for. In PaddleScout every paddle starts private, and it is enforced on our servers, so nothing is exposed unless you choose it. When you do want to share a paddle, you send a secret link to the person you meant to share it with, not a public page a stranger can scroll. Your home water, and the times you tend to be on it, stay yours. We go deeper on how that works in our post on private by default.

You should not have to broadcast your routine to log a paddle. Privacy by default should be the norm for everyone, and its absence costs women the most.