From u/numbershikes

My partner and I go to obscure arc sites and I'd hate for this information to potentially get shared.

"Account creation happens automatically after logging into GaiaGPS.com.

To change your activity to "private", after your account has been created go to https://accounts.outsideonline.com/oidc-frontend/settings/privacy and update your settings for "Profile Privacy", which was automatically set to "Public", and "Activity Privacy", which was automatically set to "Everyone".

The wording of the disclosures is unclear, but it sounds like they might automatically share users' recently saved GPS tracks to their public feeds, which can be a safety issue for some people."

This is just another example of what to expect, along with continued price increases, now that Gaia GPS is owned by Outside Interactive, Inc. The technical term in IT is "enshittification" (seriously), a neologism for the process of transforming something into shit. Making an app "social" is a common step in the sequence.

To quote Cory Doctorow:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business |customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the |ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the |other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.1

It's about time to start looking for a new mapping app.