I’d assumed the calendar functionality was always private, but I’ve just realised you can view the calendar of anyone who has “Career & Workouts” setting set to “Public”.
Now I’m using the calendar more often and storing health data and plans for my week etc. in annotations it isn’t something I’d want to be public, so I’ve had to set my profile as “Private”. This isn’t ideal, as I wanted to be able to share my workouts in a team that I’m a member of.
Could you make “Calendar Privacy” as a separate setting in the Profile page?
@Nate_Pearson has said they don’t want to go down the privacy toggle rabbit hole. I think that is an error. In addition to calendar controls I want to be able to hide gps data on outdoor rides. They are right that there is an incredibly deep whole there, but the amount of data they are collecting is pretty staggering and needs some controls if you want to be able to share it at all.
I’m willing to concede TR may use it anonymized as part of their big-data analytics, But for the same reason all my Strava is ‘private’, I think my TR data and calendar should be too. If I want to share something, I’ll do it on my terms, with the folks I want… not the whole interwebs.
It does now I’ve set the “Career & Workouts” setting set to “Private”.
The problem is that now I’m unable to share any of my workouts in a team I’m a member of.
At the very least the “Career & Workouts” setting should be renamed to “Career, Calendar & Workouts” to make it more transparent how the data sharing is working. I can’t imagine many people would actually want public calendars.
Understood. I’ve always had mine as ‘private’, but indeed it makes it a bit messy to selectively share stuff if/when needed. The ‘all or none’ proposition usually leaves me with downloading .fit files and sending them via email to a buddy who wants to look via GC or WKO4 or whatever…
As previously noted, changing the privacy functionality in TR seems unnecessary.
I do think the addition of the Calendar and the intended use of Annotations for things like life events create a new opening for discussion.
It may well include items people want to use for scheduling purposes, but not want shared. I actually think they need to consider adding a mid level control that allows visibility of workouts and the calendar separately.
I am currently including my blood donations because they impact my training. I expect there are many other reasons people would add events or notes that are relevant to them, but they do NOT want shared openly.
The current setup allows control, but it is a bit limiting. As such, I think TR needs to consider the implications of the added benefit of the Calendar and what it may contain. I don’t think the binary option for the entire account is sufficient any more.
Agree. I’m cool with others seeing the workouts I’ve completed or have planned, but I don’t want details of when I’m away for a weekend etc. being public.
The solution could be as simple as just hiding all annotations when you’re viewing someone elses calendar.
I’m not sure what is easiest or best from a programming perspective, but I think this issue is worthy of more review.
I am tagging @Bryce in hopes that he will relay this info to the appropriate channels. If needed, I can submit a Feature Request via the main website channel.
I am all for having a halfway option between full private and full public as I want “my team” to be able to see my rides and notes etc but not anyone else. Its the one reason why I will still be syncing across to TP so I can share on there with a select few.
I agree this is incredibly short-sighted to not have optionality with privacy. TR has quickly grown to be MUCH more social in nature. This forum is a fantastic example. Having forum members able to see certain workouts or my career TSS view would be additive to the value of a given forum discussion. Conversely, I don’t want a public view of annotations like “Vacation in X” or “Work in Y”, or “Felt like $hit today because…”.
I have my account set to private and use Strava for my more social activities (using some of their privacy features). Strava is hardly the benchmark I would use for data privacy standards, but it is dramatically more useful than TR’s binary approach. If TR wants to encourage a social environment on its platform (which this forum, the fb pages, podcasts seem to strongly indicate), it really needs to reconsider.
One option might be to set up a free Training Peaks account, have the rides pushed there automatically and allow access there for download and analysis.
As others have mentioned right now we only have two settings: Fully private or fully public.
There’s no fine grain control.
That is something I want to do in the future, but there are much better things that I think we start adding more public/private features. There’s also a worry about not understanding the features. Right now it’s pretty easy to understand, but I’d hate to get into a situation where someone thought something was private but it was really public.
So in general, great care has to be taken in the design and implementation of more public/private features.
Some good conversation here, especially surrounding annotations. Like most, I don’t care who can see my planned or past workouts, but annotations are for me only. Not really sure I put anything super private there, but I either way it’s not something I want anyone else reading.
@Nate_Pearson I appreciate there’s a large amount of dev involved in building the fine grain privacy controls, so what about simply only making annotations visible when you’re viewing your own calendar? This seems logical, plus would be way easier to implement.
From reading this thread it looks like most people would be happy to have public profiles if annotations would be hidden.
If things remain as they are you end up with a strange situation - if you buy-in to the TR calendar and start using it for all planning, including using annotations, then you’re forced to make your profile private… this means you can no longer utilise other useful TR functonality such as Teams. By using the calendar as TR intended your overall TR experience becomes more restricted.
I think you’ve actually got this situation as it stands. When looking at the “Career & Workouts” privacy setting in my profile I took it at face value; that only “Career” and “Workouts” would be made public. I thought the calendar was private, when in reality anyone could view it.
Being able to view other people’s calendars is a great feature. I’d personally be real interested in looking at the plans of other TR triathletes to see how they’re structuring their training. For this to work it depends on most people setting their profile to public.
While I completely understand the tradeoff being made by Nate, this is a real issue.
As I’m sure other may have pointed out, the other platforms I routinely use (Strava, RWGPS, TrainingPeaks) make it easy to:
configure all new workouts as private by default
toggle each individual workout as public (or only visible to friends)
As I’m sure TR understands, many feel that more granular privacy controls are now considered basic table stakes and hence the reaction seen in this and other threads.
If I want to share TR views of a particular workout, my only options right now are:
screenshot of TR (which I’m doing on this forum)
push it to another platform with more granular privacy controls
and that sucks IMHO.
I’m ok living with it for awhile as I’d rather see more updates to performance analytics in the short term (thank you for new interval search!!!), but it is very annoying and should get resolved in 2019.
