Currently the privacy settings are set such that you can either make your activities private, or share your activities to different levels of groups (connections, groups, public).
This means that unless you share all of your information with a group or your connections (ie sleep schedule, movement activities, hear rate calories etc), stepcounts don't even show on your connections leaderboard.
There should be an option to make daily or weekly stepcounts have separate privacy controls from the Daily Summary logs
I would like to engage in a friendly step count jostle without making my life an open book