If Strava’s very odd attempt to drag Garmin into a legal battle wasn’t strange enough on its own, a Strava employee trying to drag Garmin in the court of public opinion just made it worse.
Matt Salazar, the Chief Product Officer at Strava, took to Reddit, of all places, to try restore Strava’s reputation after it was revealed yesterday that the social training platform was taking Garmin to court for, uh, questionable reasons.
Salazar’s attempt to appeal to the common person / Strava user went about as well as you’d expect. Which is not very well at all. Not that appealing to the comments section of an online forum was ever going to go well, but the Garmin actions Salazar attempted to paint as villanous also happened to perfectly describe recent actions taken by Strava. So this went spectacularly bad. I can all but see Salazar staring at his screen and muttering “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
An appeal to the court of public opinion
Salazar’s attempt to “set the record straight” about why Strava was going after Garmin boiled down to two points. One, Garmin is requesting attribution on the Strava platform for data collected by Garmin devices. Two, Strava thinks this is an unfair request of users and the lawsuit is Strava’s attempt to ride into battle to defend its users freedom.
To quote Salazar’s Reddit post directly:
“We consider this to be YOUR data. If you recorded an activity on your watch, we think that is your data. We believe you should be able to freely transfer or upload that data without requiring logos to be displayed alongside it or have that data be used as an advertisement to sell more watches.”
Redditors in the comment were very quick to point out that Strava pretending to protect users’ data is a hypocritical position, at best. Especially considering the platform recently tried to hold its own API partners hostage, until it faced public backlash. This effectively killed off users ability to use “their data” from Strava on a growing ecosystem of third-party sites that provided different analysis or breakdowns of that data. Others pointed out that the platform has made it quite difficult for users to control what of “their data” was shared publicly in the past, even when it potentially lead to safety issues for users.
It’s also worth noting that this all but admits that DC Rainmaker’s hypothesis in his very detailed breakdown of the dispute when he broke the story, that this entire legal misadventure is about adding tiny logo in Strava, is likely right on the money.
As many users pointed out, this attempt to win users hearts looked a lot more like a public admission. Accusing Garmin of “caring more about their marketing than your user experience” sounds a lot like the pot calling the kettle black.
You can read the original post and the lengthy responses on Reddit.