I was looking at www.strava.com, not the /features page.
Even there, it's just this one image and the mention of "analyzing performance", the rest of the page describes the social network and location tracking aspects.
I'm not disputing that Strava offers services that analyze your health data. They clearly do and this wouldn't be a problem by itself. (If they don't pass on the data)
What I find disingenuous is that the marketing paints this as an optional feature that you could activate in addition to the main areas "location tracking" and "sports/health-focused social networking" - however, the actual sign-up flow (according to the OP) seems to go from a different premise: That analyzing health data is actually the core functionality of the site.
If they were marketing this as a site where you can analyze your health data, all would be fine. But then you could just make providing health data access a mandatory step of sign-up - users probably wouldn't be surprised since the service was obviously useless without access.
But pretending you're a general health/sporting portal with optional analysis functionality, then nagging the user into giving you access is shady.
Note: I didn't verify that the sign-up flow is still like this, so they might have shifted from being health focused when OP tried to sign up to being located focused now, I don't know. This would be better, even though it's not clear to me why they would have needed to nag in the first place.
Even there, it's just this one image and the mention of "analyzing performance", the rest of the page describes the social network and location tracking aspects.
I'm not disputing that Strava offers services that analyze your health data. They clearly do and this wouldn't be a problem by itself. (If they don't pass on the data)
What I find disingenuous is that the marketing paints this as an optional feature that you could activate in addition to the main areas "location tracking" and "sports/health-focused social networking" - however, the actual sign-up flow (according to the OP) seems to go from a different premise: That analyzing health data is actually the core functionality of the site.
If they were marketing this as a site where you can analyze your health data, all would be fine. But then you could just make providing health data access a mandatory step of sign-up - users probably wouldn't be surprised since the service was obviously useless without access.
But pretending you're a general health/sporting portal with optional analysis functionality, then nagging the user into giving you access is shady.
Note: I didn't verify that the sign-up flow is still like this, so they might have shifted from being health focused when OP tried to sign up to being located focused now, I don't know. This would be better, even though it's not clear to me why they would have needed to nag in the first place.