14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has announced yet another acquisition, just a day after its quarterly earnings report that indicated that the company had made a hefty profit during the first three months of 2014.
The newest addition is Moves, an app created for iPhone and Android devices that can track users’ everyday life and activity levels.
“Today, we're delighted to announce that Facebook has acquired our company and the Moves app. Since we launched Moves, we’ve been focused on running a simple and clean activity diary that millions of people have enjoyed using,” reads an announcement posted on the web page of ProtoGeo Oy.
The company behind the app was founded back in January 2012 in Helsinki, Finland, and sought to develop a “pioneering all-day activity diary for smartphones.” Moves was eventually launched in January 2013 and has been downloaded 4 million times so far.
If you’re a fan of the app and the company, you shouldn’t fear about the future since there are no plans to discontinue the app, as it often happens with acquired startups.
“For those of you that use the Moves app – the Moves experience will continue to operate as a standalone app, and there are no plans to change that or commingle data with Facebook,” the announcement reads.
That being said, the startup is looking to squelch the fears of users that their data could somehow end up in Facebook’s hands, a company that already has a lot of information on over 1.2 billion people in the world.
WhatsApp users used to have the same fears following the news that the messaging app had been acquired by Facebook and the company’s CEO had to write to a blog post and make sure that everyone knew the privacy standards would remain the same.
While WhatsApp would have given Facebook access to personal information about users, Moves would give the company more data about people’s habits and frequently visited locations.
Of course, there’s a big difference between the hundreds of millions of WhatsApp fans and the over 4 million Moves users, but even so, privacy is always a concern with a company as big as Facebook.
The app can track walking, running, cycling, and other movements, while an additional 60 activity types were added recently. Moves uses smartphone sensors to track movements, which means that wearable fitness tech bands aren’t a necessity.