Back in April, Facebook announced yet another acquisition, this time in the form of the company behind the Moves app. For those unfamiliar, Moves is another one of those fitness and activity tracking apps. It tracks the user’s movement and will create visual logs to show the places that you have been, and also help point out any relevant points of interest.
Prior to the being acquired by Facebook, the app had a privacy policy in which they promised their users that they would not share an individual’s data to third parties without the user’s consent, unless compelled by law enforcement. This sounds good because it looks like Moves is taking their user’s privacy seriously.
However shortly after being acquired by Facebook, the company might have had a change of heart, which presumably has to do with Facebook acquiring them. They have since updated their policy which now reads, “We may share information, including personally identifying information, with our Affiliates (companies that are part of our corporate groups of companies, including but not limited to Facebook) to help provide, understand, and improve our Services.”
What this means is that if you were fine with Moves tracking your data but weren’t fine with Facebook doing it, it looks like Facebook could now access your data whether you like it or not. In a way this hardly comes as a surprise since the wealth of information gathered by Moves could prove useful to Facebook, especially if they’re trying to create targeted ads.
According to Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, “It’s still a loss of privacy, but they’re covering it up with semantics. This raises very disturbing privacy concerns.” What do you guys think?