How a shared route gives away an address
A dog walk is not a hike. It starts at the front door, loops around and finishes back there. One route on its own barely shows it. Put two or three on top of each other and the shared point is unmissable, after which a map search finishes the job.
Then there is the timing. Dog walks happen at similar hours, often morning and evening. A handful of shared walks therefore gives away two things at once: the address, and the hours at which nobody is behind that door.
What to check in any tracking app
- Can the beginning and end of a route be cut off before anyone else sees it?
- Does that happen on its own, or does it rest on you remembering every single time?
- Protection has to hold on the very first walk. A switch you have to go looking for arrives too late — that first walk almost always starts at home.
- Open one of your own shared walks from a second account. If you are shown the same trimmed version everyone else gets, you are not guessing.
- Is recording limited to the walk itself, or is something running in the background?
One more, and it is the one people miss: an app that always cuts at exactly the same distance can be reasoned backwards. Trim every walk by the same amount and the visible starting points all end up that same distance from one front door — the centre of that ring is the address. A cut point that moves about makes that considerably harder.
Two workarounds that hold up poorly
Starting the recording a street or two from home sounds sensible enough. In practice it demands attention every day, and eventually a day comes when you forget. The missing stretch also disappears from your own totals.
The other common fix is posting a screenshot instead of the route. That works only while the surroundings are unrecognisable, which they usually are not. Both are patches for something the app ought to be handling instead of you.
How Barnaby handles it
Barnaby cuts the beginning and the end away before the walk is uploaded: the document other people draw their map from only ever holds the shortened version. It is on from your first walk, with nothing to go looking for. You are shown the same trimmed version as everybody else, so there is nothing to misjudge. Distance and duration are untouched and still count the whole walk. The default is 50 metres and the ceiling is 125 — why not more, and what survives the trimming anyway, is on the Home Zone page.