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news
Bike thiefLock up your apps, say police — thieves use ride-tracking sites to target bikes
With the mild weather and days finally getting longer, a timely reminder from Humberside Police not to give away the location of your precious bike - or bikes - on ride-tracking apps such as Strava and Map My Ride or via social media.
The Hull Daily Mail's Kevin Shoesmith reports http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/Burglars-using-cycling-8216-fitness-route... that police and bike shop owners believe thieves are using information from the apps to guide them to valuable bikes.
It's vital that privacy settings on the apps are switched on, warned Sergeant Rob Danby, of the Riverside neighbourhood policing team, which covers Hull city centre.
He said: "Members of the public should take care when using apps such as Strava to ensure they do not inadvertently give away private information and locations.
"Such apps can give criminals a clue to where valuable items may be stored."
Bike shop owners report that customers increasingly suspect ride-tracking apps have guided thieves to their bikes.
Wayne Preston, of Cliff Pratt Cycles said: "People who have had bikes stolen come into the shop and we get into the conversation of what happened.
"In some cases, people have not activated the privacy settings on Strava."
Information posted on social media can provide a clue for thieves, and ride-tracking apps can leave them to bikes, Mr Preston believes.
"I don't have any pictures of my bikes on Facebook, but I know people do," he said.
"People happily put photos of their shining £3,000 bike up for everyone to see."
A Strava search for the owner's name can then reveal where rides start and finish, leading the thief to a valuable bike.
Mr Preston said: "The best advice I can give is if you are going to use apps make sure you switch it off a good distance from your house.
"Personally, I would much rather lose a mile off my Strava record than have my house or garage burgled and my bikes stolen."
You can also protect your home location by setting a privacy zone, which masks a location on your rides, or restricting who can follow you.
Luke Anderson of Freetown Sports also believes thieves are using Strava to find bikes and urged people to use the service's privacy features.
"It is definitely happening," he said. "There is the option to block your start point and people need to use it."
Proper bike security is paramount, Sgt Danby said.
"A lot of people keep bikes in sheds with minimal security," he said. "People need to be wary about where and how they store their bikes.
"We've known people to use a £2 lock to secure a bike worth £4,000. They won't spend £50 on a decent lock."
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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A few changes to consider:
Switch on Strava's Enhanced Privacy mode
Strava allows you to ad multiple addresses each with a privacy zone, so by selecting a number of locations around your home you can effective boost you 1 miles radius to about 6 miles.
Under 'My Profile > Location', you can change it from your city to more general (e.g. England)
Do you really need to specify which bike you used? Stating a brand and model or including the name in your ride title (e.g. 'first ride on new Dogma') is searchable
Garmin Connect has few controls, but you can at least keep your rides private.
All good. Naming bikes especially: you'll know what MuddyFox87 is, even if looks retro to most. Stick up photos of your first MTB if you really want discretion.
Some more
* Don't use your real name. Strava lets you use "!" as a surname, hence, "Contender !", "Thighmeister !", or "Faceplant !" or any other nickname you want.
* keep any joined up instagram account anonymous too.
* get some distance from your house before starting/stopping recording. If you go via a friends house, start after you leave it. Else correlating "rode with" routes can find the second house on the road.
* If you end up having to return home, stop and restart, or make it private.
* be selective about which Strava clubs you join. They leak information.
As an example, take this leader board from bristol. Too many names are real; in a smaller town easier to track down. Then there's facebook, linkedin... What's worse, you can click on any of the rides that placed and get the full ride, including start/finish points even if they start or stop in a privacy zone. Real name + nearby/actual starting points is too much data to publish.
Be paranoid: you know it makes sense.
And wear a tin foil hat as well so they can't read your mind as well?
I for one have my real name on Strava.
My Instagram account is joined to it and not anonymous.
I start Strava on my doorstep, and regulary ride with mates, resulting in a lot of 'rode with' rides.
I've never had anyone come and try nick my bike, because people just don't use strava for it.
You may as well just not ride outdoors if you're going to be so paranoid.
Do you ride a different route every day?
After all someone could easily see you ride past one day and then just wait around.
That's like saying "I've never had a car stolen, therefore people don't nick cars".
Out of interest, if you have never had a car stolen, or a house burgled, do you leave your car/house unlocked?
Surely if the police think that it might be a tool that criminals are using, it is worth taking a few sensible precautions.
Leaving a car/house open is not analogous to Strava though.
Bikes always have and always will get stolen.
I just don't think Strava is a factor in bike theft at all.
People could just watch you come in and out your house and decide they'll break in for your bike/ambush you on the bike.
What 'sensible' precautions do you take against that then?
Ride the first 5k with a blanket over your bike?
I was using an analogy. You said that you use Strava, you haven't had your bike stolen, therefore bike thieves don't use Strava to target bikes.
I said therefore, if you had never had a car stolen would you leave your car unlocked, or do you believe that to do so would make your car more susceptible to being stolen?
Absolutely.
But just because you think something, doesn't mean it is correct. If I was going to nick bikes, I think I might use the Strava to help me. So why wouldn't an actual bike thief? (And I do agree, that I might be wrong).
You seem to be struggling with with the meaning of the word sensible.
Sensible is to turn on your privacy zone, not list details of your bikes, just name them Road Bike 1 or MTB 1 / 2 etc.
I wouldn't wear a tin foil hat as they show up well on CCTVs and that would mark you down as suspicious to The Man.
I actually work in "google-scale" datamining infrastructure, which is why I get to go to google for coffee, LinkedIn for lunch and Facebook for an early evening tequila. I'm not being over-paranoid, simply planning ahead.
If you look at the coverage of the issue in Bristol Traffic you can see that (a) I know what is possible, and (b) I pre-empted some of the Snowden revelations, not because I was involved in that work, but because I know what people like Facebook get up to.
I am happy that the usual bike-thieves around Bristol aren't up to using this data —yet. I'm making recommendations about what information security policy (fancy work: INFOSEC) you'd need to stop someone like me doing it. Because I do know about things like "Deanonymization", data aggregation etc. The main reason there isn't a Bristol Traffic article naming and shaming the top 5 sprinters on the railway path the topic is that I don't want the basic tactics to become known.
What you have to consider though is how secure that data is two years from now, once someone does work out how to do bulk grabs of the rides (notice how even "private" rides have a URL which you can share?), how you can automate getting the entire list of people who have completed some black-run MTB trail then look for their names on linked in? Once your data is out there, it's not going to go back.
This was an article on INFOSEC, so that's what I covered.
Like you noted, operational security, OPSEC, matters more today. Which, in Bristol, means making sure nobody follows you from the Ashton Court MTB trails, the Suspension Bridge after a road ride or back from Wales with your MTBs on the roof.
The only time I've had a bike stolen so far was when some kids grabbed it while loading it in my driveway, pushing over my son in the process, while my wife was just inside the front door. I wasn't paranoid enough then.
More recently
-someone hit the shed of a friend, a friend whose BMW in the driveway had a visible roof rack.
-someone grabbed two bikes from a friend's garage. The police were called by a neighbour, but not the owners. It's now believed the thieves were still in the garage at the time, something the owners could have checked better than the police.
-A school-parent on a good road bike got tracked home by some teenagers, and even though he went past his house when he noticed them, he was still robbed within the week.
Most worrying recently was someone got mugged in Leigh Woods Bristol, at knife point, at the same time of I day I'd to a mid-morning ride. I don't see a good defence there except ride a busier periods or with friends. A helmet cam could get some photos of the thieves, but wouldn't stop it happening.
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