Facebook Acquires Fitness Tracking App Moves Amid Privacy Concerns

Facebook continued its ongoing acquisition spree this week, picking up the company behind fitness tracking application Moves.

Moves is available on Android and iOS, and automatically records a users’ walking, cycling and running activities, providing information on the distance travelled, duration, steps taken and calories burned.

While it’s unclear what Facebook plans to do with the fitness app, Moves seems pretty excited about the acquisition, though the terms have not been disclosed.

Moves said on its website, “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. Now, we’re joining Facebook’s talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people.”

The acquisition follows Facebook’s recent moves of building or buying stand-alone apps. Moves will add to a growing bundle of Facebook’s multiple mobile properties, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Paper.

Apps such as Moves could be advantageous for Facebook, who could use them to gather data. After all, its business model is centered around knowledge of its users which is used to sell targeted ads (reaffirmed by the company’s earnings call made earlier this week, which highlighted increasing revenues gained by this medium). Moves was quick to defend any privacy concerns and said that it has no plans to share user data with Facebook.

“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 Moves team said.

Facebook has yet to comment on its latest acqusition.

Moves is available to download for free from the iTunes Store and the Google Play store now.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.