rrheisler wrote:
Basically that if it is considered health data, it should be private, period -- full stop. Doesn't matter whether you have an opt in or not.
Thanks for addressing that. I guess Zwift wouldn't want to be the guinea pig case on breadth of GPDR coverage.
That said, something else just came to mind. I am not a lawyer, and I am not familiar with health laws, either in the U.S. or in the EU. Having said that, if height and mass are considered privileged due to classification as health data, then what about HR? Certainly the argument could be made (by a regular layperson such as myself) that if height and mass qualify as health data, then HR, especially as response to exertion, should also be considered to be health data.
However, that Zwift appears not to remove HR info from ZwiftPower would appear to create a contradiction. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on this could shed light on this?
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trail wrote:
Grantbot21 wrote:
but now were consistently needing to focus on weight to be competitive in these races. I’d have to search for it online, but there was a recent blog post by one of the female pro cyclists.
That doesn't change, though, does it? Zwift is concealing the public nature, but are heavily invested in weight-based physics. That's where Zwift is kind of stuck. Cake, eat it too, etc. Though I can't think of any obvious way out of that. Weight is super important in real world cycling too, of course. Zwift is just approximating that.
But it still won't be hard to work out approximate weights, given that W/kg and W #'s are still public, apparently.
I think the pro cyclist in question is Alice Lethbridge, and she wrote the following in response to Zwift HQ's original post.
Quote:
I have a history of eating disorders. My first race in zwift, I could immediately see that at 175cm and 66kg I was pretty much the heaviest woman in the race. Outdoors I had been riding well, my weight hasn’t been an issue to me and I was doing well with battling the eating disorder voices that never go away completely. But now I immediately felt embarrassed that everyone could see how ‘heavy’ I was compared to the other riders. I got a great 20 min wkg that day (5.0) but that was overshadowed by how rubbish I felt about my weight.
Even though I tried to fight it, I rapidly slipped into disordered eating again. Had I only been able to see I had the best 20 min wkg in the TT and had come second, that wouldn’t have happened in the same way. Yes, I may still have realised a kg loss here or there would ‘help’, but I wouldn’t have seen how many other women my height were 5-8kg lighter.
The weight and height data being visible on every single event provides another way for riders to compare themselves. You don’t focus on training to improve your absolute power, you end up drawn into losing weight to match your peers (or to keep yourself lighter than them).
When I spoke up about my difficulties at the end of season 2 of ZRL, I was overwhelmed by how many people from premier division though to D category contacted me to say the display of weight on zwift also created pressure for them to lose weight.
Eating disorders are really complex and really hard to understand, even for professionals like GPs. I don’t expect people to get it but I just really hope they can see that this could be so significant in saving people from permanent health issues
being the pedantic git that I am,
I looked up the race she mentioned. I'm not at all sure that taking away a few pieces of data would lead to anything different. Presumably, after implementation of the new rules, ZwiftPower would still show that she did 327 W (which is a tremendous amount power if done in a TT position) for 22:15, while the person who won did 279 W for 22:03. Of course, the "red cape" in the form of actual mass is no longer shown, but she does know that speed on Zwift is dependent on w/kg and height, and it wouldn't require too much more for her to figure out the mass of the person who bested her. What then?
Also, as an aside, this is a prime example of the shite physics simulation on Zwift. How is it possible that 327 W (and 5 W/kg) could be slower than 279 W (and 4.7 W/kg) on a flat course?