Good point... not totally sure how the details work here.

I believe that's incorrect. It certainly is for my rides. I have examples where I've left my house, ridden a few km, come back to my house and then carried on. The track to my house is visible to others but the start and stop points of the ride are both outside the privacy zone.

I stand corrected. I looked back at my favorite figure-8 century route that allows me to stop at the house to refill bottles, and use the plumbing. The start and end are outside the privacy zone, but you can clearly see my mid-ride stop.

Interesting, those stops don't appear to show on the heat map. The first release of the 2017 heat map had a bright route up my driveway; but there no color there now.

Unfortunately a lot of people must've wanted options up front, so Strava put them up front, and now we're back up to a 4 tap process to begin recording a ride.

Ride With GPS is just a one tap process.

I have to zoom in to see a few faint lines going to my house. They're either the rides I did where I stopped mid ride or others dropping by. Not very visible if I'm zoomed out though.

If I zoom-in to the point where my house is most of the screen, I see a couple faint lines... I know that's my riding buddy that stops over for beers. But like you say, can't see it without zoning way in.

The Runtastic road cycling app is just a one tap process, too. Just open the app and tap on the green "Start Activity" bar. I haven't used the Strava app in a while so not sure how involved it is.

Funny to see how many people are recording their driving on Strava, check out the highway cloverleaf below - 394&494 west of Minneapolis.

Call me suspicious, but I question anyone who "owns" a Strava record doing 4 miles at 57 mph (in a 50-55 zone). Not that they deserve a speeding ticket, just that they did it on a bike.

I'm a little OCD (more than a little), there's a road segment near the parking area for a popular single-track trail... the top of the leaderboard was totally full of people that left the single-track trails in the car and forgot to turn off Strava. I spent an afternoon flagging activities when you can see them going 60 mph on the highway.

Footnote - riders can crop rides, keeping the ride when they were biking and removing the part in a car.

After the big security fuss Strava implemented some new rules in their heatmap generation. One of them was that nothing will appear on the heatmap if only one user rode in that area. That change alone eliminates the majority of driveways from heatmaps even if users don't have privacy zones.

I did a lot of gravel exploring the past few years where I've been down plenty of roads that no other Strava user has, so all those rides disappeared from the global heatmap. Its a mildly annoying since it hides plenty of unmarked trails that you might otherwise be able to discover.

Yeah, a LOT of my tracks in Wyoming disappeared. Bummer.