
Moves joins Facebook - Aaronneyer
http://moves-app.com/press
======
pilif
What really annoys me about this: I don't get a warning when this is
happening. I had an account with them and now Facebook owns that data with
zero recourse for me.

Sure - the moment I read this, I deleted my account and the app, but who's to
say that the data is really gone now and hasn't been copied to Facebook before
this?

First they got all my WhatsApp messages and now my Moves data.

No longer can I chose to not share data with Facebook when they can just come
in and purchase it after-the-fact. This will certainly make me even more
careful whom I'm willing to create an account with.

Up until the WhatsApp and Moves deal, I had this rule that if I pay for it,
it'll probably going to be independent because whoever's running it will be
able to sustain it.

But now that this is out of the window, what's left as an indicator? How can I
use a service if I don't want the data I create/store there to end up at
Facebook?

~~~
ambivalence
How do you mean "All your WhatsApp messages"? Isn't it by design that WhatsApp
only ever stores undelivered messages? Once they reach the recipient, they're
gone from the servers. This lets the infrastructure be really small compared
to the number of users on the system.

~~~
pilif
Who knows what they do with the messages. They certainly weren't peer-to-peer
encrypted, so for all we know, they were storing a copy "for later use".

Even if they weren't initially, they could have started storing them whenever
they wanted without telling anybody or any other indication that they would.

Especially since the deal with Facebook, assume all messages to be kept around
and linked with your profile.

~~~
grahamel
They back the messages up if you selected it in the settings (think it's opt
in)

~~~
jmathai
That doesn't mean they don't back it up if you don't select it in the
settings.

------
droob
BOOOOOooooooooo. I'm tired of this game of whack-a-mole I have to play on my
home screen. If I've learned anything as a modern user it's not to let any app
become a part of your routine. It's not worth the hassle when they cash out.

~~~
Kiro
> 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.

What exactly is your problem?

~~~
ahknight
Facebook and their historical lack of concern for people's data privacy. If FB
or Google buy something, about a third of the users will leave (nearly)
overnight to avoid getting caught in the data trap.

~~~
renaudg
Can you elaborate using undisputable facts the "historical lack of concern for
people's data privacy" ?

It is a widely assumed belief that I have never seen backed up with hard
facts.

User data being FB & Google's crown jewels and competitive advantage, you bet
that they are concerned about not leaking it to anyone at all...

~~~
bertil
> It is a widely assumed belief that I have never seen backed up with hard
> facts.

‘Privacy’ or even ‘Data’ are not even remotely well defined enough for those
statements to have a clear meaning. However, many people have felt betrayed
when using Facebook.

Some of it — potentially the majority of cases — have to do with the fact that
the service is new, and the lack of understanding led to many context
collapses: there are many situations to consider, but all involve three people
knowing each other, one having authority over a second, but not a third.
Classic case involve a teenage child, a parent and a common friend or
relative. The relative reveals inadvertently something. This is far more
disempowering to non-users mentioned by friends, or whose photo was taken.

Facebook was openly careless about those cases, manu legitimate — Mark
Zuckerberg went up to publicly justify his disregard by saying that people
shouldn’t have things to hide to their friends, a callous statement if there
is any.

There are many more problematic cases, where the person feeling betrayed was
attentive and knowledgable, but Facebook changed the way they handle privacy
without clear warning, and something that wasn’t became visible. This is the
case of profile pictures, for instance. You have important social information
there; some people assumed that their photo with their significant other would
remain as private as their set it, but that changed, without recourses. There
are many more similar issues, related to poor explanations of updates.

There is no way the wordings chose for most updates came form considerate
product managers.

There are more examples, generally to the overall attitude: ‘better ask for
foregiveness than permission’, rephrased as (and plastered all over their
headquarter as essential values): “Move fast, break things”. When it comes to
privacy, you can’t get the cat back in the bag.

Company motto, public statements by the Founder-CEO, presentation of privacy-
impacting updates… that’s plenty of proof for who would take five minutes to
care looking.

I know for a fact that people at Facebook care about those — just they haven’t
cared enough, repeatedly; and those cases where well documented.

------
ohadron
Seems like Facebook is completely unaware of how the public perceives their
disrespect for user privacy.

If I was a competitor the first thing I'd do right now is to make a way to
migrate users' data from Moves to my app.

~~~
lewisflude
I personally don't feel they disrespect privacy and furthermore I know there
are others who feel similarly. It's usually those who are outraged (not always
the minority) that are the loudest.

~~~
droopyEyelids
For the record, I think they take privacy seriously, however I think allowing
an entity to build up that much information on you & your family is inherently
risky behavior.

History has shown that laws may target unpopular groups who have done nothing
wrong, and well meaning governments can force well meaning companies to
divulge information relevant to unjust laws.

~~~
ballpoint
It definitely seems a little naive to hand over the keys to your life's data
without accepting that you're taking on a fairly large amount of risk with
regards to privacy. Even if the party to which you're handing it over doesn't
intentionally behave maliciously, you still have to trust that they share your
exact opinion on what reasonable use of the data is.

------
gbrhaz
I stopped using Moves a while ago when I noticed it absolutely hammering my
battery. It was unfortunate as I used it almost as a journal (easier to
remember what I was doing on the day when all that data is available).

~~~
Shank
The journal feature is the thing I missed the most when jumping back to
Fitbit. It had an uncanny laser-like accuracy for figuring out to the minute
duration for when I was at a location. I miss that data a lot.

------
incanus77
Yep, I'm outta here. At least I can still export my data, unlike what happened
/ is happening with Gowalla:

[http://www.quora.com/Gowalla/Where-did-my-Gowalla-data-
go](http://www.quora.com/Gowalla/Where-did-my-Gowalla-data-go)

A few weeks back I started playing with Moves' new export and TileMill, with
some cool results:

[https://twitter.com/incanus77/status/454306725311442944](https://twitter.com/incanus77/status/454306725311442944)

[https://twitter.com/incanus77/status/454307378482016256](https://twitter.com/incanus77/status/454307378482016256)

------
rickyc091
Loved the app, but I'm hitting the delete account button as we speak.

------
alexcason
cmd+f journey

Yes!

"Thank you for supporting us on this journey, and we’re looking forward to our
future at Facebook!"

~~~
Aardshaark
[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

------
gtirloni
"joins" is quite an interesting word to use for being acquired and answering
to new bosses.

------
ulfw
Why does everyone have to use PR-Speak these days. "joins Facebook". That
sounds like they're happy buddies going together now as equals. Why not simply
say "Moves was bought by Facebook". Nothing wrong with that?!

~~~
forgottenpass
I think this is another example of a popular business practice a few
commenters have been pointing out a lot recently: "ignoring the considerable
power you wield over other people and expecting them to ignore it too." We saw
it with that out of touch ceo [0], as well as both Theresa and Tom Preston-
Werner.

In other words, they're using PR-speak because they've started believing it.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639962)

------
emdowling
The post talks about data not going anywhere. Will the app itself continue to
be updated? I recently stopped wearing a fitbit in favor of just using Moves
and couldn't be happier. I hope the app continues to live on.

~~~
happyscrappy
Are you on a 5S? How bad a beating does the battery take?

~~~
ahknight
Not bad at all. Just turn on the setting to "reduce battery usage" and it
falls back (almost entirely) to using the M7 chip and reading cached data
periodically.

~~~
happyscrappy
Thanks. I set "reduce battery usage" but my phone doesn't have the M7 so the
battery hit is still pretty bad.

------
harmonicon
I am very dismayed at news that Facebook acquired Moves. That's one less app I
will be using on my phone. However I have to stop to think is this just a
knee-jerk reaction?

Most of my friends, when I talk to them about how much information is being
collected by FB/GOOGLE, just do not care all that much. Responses range from
"I got nothing to hide from anybody" to "I think targeted ad is just fine". At
that point I don't know what to say. Since in my case I just have a visceral
hate toward company who attempt to collect all data about myself. Is it
actually that bad?

~~~
bertil
Yes and no… But ‘no, it doesn’t matter’ isn’t the good option here.

Thing of it as your credit rating (if you live in the US) or you ability to
lie to your plumber and say “I’ll just ask another one” when you have a leak,
water up the knees and he asks for a month’s salary to fix the issue.
Information matters when it allows to measure you willingness to pay for
something — it’s basic micro-economics.

You can step in a wine merchant or your car dealer (both classic cases in the
economic literature) or with either a t-shirt or a suit and tie; in either
case, they’ll offer you all the same options, but unless the labels are true
(they are _not_ if they are too high and without dealer-negotiated rebate) the
price will adapt and make sure you’ll pay as much as you can.

So… what happens on-line? Well, with the traces of your Facebook and Google
logs, airlines can tell if you are really willing to take _that_ flight, and
might rake up the prices accordingly. It can come in many ways, depending if
they have LinkedIn information (and can tell if it is for business or not) and
they are generally far from perfect, but… Imagine that at one point, people
notice it can be cheaper when you use the Incognito mode.

That would trigger a reaction: political ones (banning the practice, unlikely
in the US; already done for some cases in the EU); one would be to only sell
through a mobile application that have your Facebook ID (or your mobile phone,
same thing) and don’t let you the option of hiding it. Very rapidly, anyone
who refuses to be identified will be refused service — just like you can only
pay using credit cards and letting FISA know you bough something big for many
things today.

Forced service, cash is King? No problem: just make it more expensive than
most non-revealing option, like what happen now if you want to purchase a car
sticker-price. You are perfectly welcome to say you have negotiation and don’t
want to deal with the slimy sales tactic: they would be happy to oblige.

But imagine that is not jus cars, but anything that is advertised on Facebook
now: restaurants, transport, real-estate, games, electronic. Face value crazy
high; “social price” lower, but never exactly the same.

You might be fine not having the social value — but if a single entity
controls enough information about how much enough people are willing to pay…
we will all suffer, except the stock-holders of that application.

------
CanSpice
For those of you who might be looking to move away from Moves, you could give
Breeze a try. It's only available for the iPhone 5S (because of its M7 chip).
It was announced last week by Runkeeper:
[http://blog.runkeeper.com/1547/runkeeper-debuts-new-
iphone-a...](http://blog.runkeeper.com/1547/runkeeper-debuts-new-iphone-app-
for-passive-tracking-breeze/)

I haven't tried it, but I already have a Runkeeper account and I think I'm
going to give it a shot.

~~~
euphemize
Breeze is not really a replacement. It's a simple step counter app, it does
not differentiate from different activity types, and is much worse on battery
than Moves.

------
ejain
Too bad the terms of the deal aren't public, because that would tell us if
this is just another talent acquisition, or if Facebook has an interest in the
app (or data)...

I've been using the Moves app to add important context to my "quantified self"
data on zenobase.com. The Saga app is an alternative in case Moves languishes
--at least until they get acquired by someone, too :-)

------
rismay
Are there any open source alternatives? Is anyone interested in building one?

~~~
lazerwalker
I've been toying around with throwing together an open-source clone for a
while now. If you limit it to the 5S, the M7 abstracts away a lot of the hard
problems you'd otherwise have to solve manually, and you can eliminate the
server component by just having a flat-file Dropbox export (a la Nicholas
Felton's Reporter app).

Anyone interested in maybe jamming on something like this should definitely
drop me a line.

~~~
rismay
I rushed to buy the 5S for the M7. I was disappointed with the results. If you
look at the offering of M7 apps, they mainly deal with step counting. The
actual activity recognition is dismal (stationary, walking, driving, etc.) I
had a demo of this working the afternoon the 5S came out. To get really good
activity segmentation you need to monitor the accelerometer, not the GPS. This
boils down to a signal processing problem, which I have no experience in. Any
volunteers to tackle that problem?

------
mewwts
Aaaand I do not feel comfortable using Moves anymore.

------
dspillett
_> "the Moves experience will continue to operate as a standalone app, and
there are no plans to change that or commingle data with Facebook"_

I very much doubt this will remain the case for long, otherwise why would they
bother buying it?

~~~
uptown
Facebook is starting to unbundle their apps, so the standalone commitment may
be true. Instagram has remained standalone. They're separating their messaging
app into its own app.

~~~
dspillett
I was referring to the data internal sharing, rather than the apps staying
individual.

It would be easy to keep it working standalone while still allowing it to
automatically integrate itself with facebook (whether you like it or not) if
you are logged in to that in the same browser session.

Though I suppose anyone genuinely bothered by that (rather than just sounding
off) won't be using facebook at all anyway.

------
cheshire137
I just exported my data via [http://moves-app.com/export](http://moves-
app.com/export) and deleted my account. Know of any alternatives for Android?

------
loceng
What are the alternatives?

~~~
droopyEyelids
Humanco Inc's Human App

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/human-make-moving-fun-
run/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/human-make-moving-fun-
run/id692721875?mt=8)

[http://form-d.findthebest.com/l/25508/Humanco-
Inc](http://form-d.findthebest.com/l/25508/Humanco-Inc)

[http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/sn...](http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapid=240385971)

Unfortunately, Humanco requires you to set up an account and store your data
on their servers. Moves was great because you could store it all locally. I
think the best option is to stick with Moves, and never update it again.

------
jkdearden
I'm definitely a fan of the brief 'About Moves' section they have at the
bottom of the page. Too often these acquisition posts offer no details about
what the app/company actually does, with the main website either not
accessible through any links on the page or just gone completely.

------
creativityhurts
For those looking for a replacement, Pedometer++ is a pretty good alternative
(I'm not related to it in any way)
[https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/pedometer++/id712286167?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/pedometer++/id712286167?mt=8)

------
hackmeister
Every breath you take Every move you make Every bond you break Every step you
take

I'll be watching you

"Every breath you take" by Sting

------
adrianlmm
Are you guys sure you hate Facebook for privacy reasons and not becuase it is
Google's nemesis?, becuase when I see someone complaining for Facebook and is
using an Android phone with a GMail account there is something wrong.

~~~
mitchty
I hate Facebook for other reasons than Google. Farmville spam of yore comes to
mind. Stupid permission changes constantly is another.

I use iOS by the way. Still have a gmail account but that might not last long.
Moving email is a bit harder than deleting an app off my home screen.

~~~
adrianlmm
Farmville spam depends of your contacts and you can stop get it them easily,
farmville is dead anyway, the stupid permission changes also exist in Google,
they have changed them as often as Facebook, so, you must hate Google as equal
I suppose.

~~~
mitchty
To be honest I nuked Facebook at the height of farmville spam (I don't
remember it being filterable at that time but could be wrong). Just couldn't
care about Facebook anymore so deleted the account. So if its better now
great, but I just have a finite amount of time in life to deal with computers
and Facebook was becoming too big of a timesink.

Theres a reason I'm looking to replace gmail after being a "beta" invitee from
ages ago. But its a long term project as I have to migrate both to new email
account and also update countless logins to use it. Pretty much on the back
burner for the moment.

~~~
adrianlmm
If you don't care about Facebook anymore (for good or bad), why would you care
then if they adquired Move? sounds illogical to me.

~~~
mitchty
Its more I'd rather not give them any more of my data. Illogical sure, but
thats just how I feel about things. I'm not going to be able to convince
anyone of the rationality of it I'm sure.

------
brianbreslin
what did Moves do? never heard of them before today.

~~~
grahamel
It's a step counter, a bit like 'map my walk/run' which counts how many steps
you walked in a day and mapped out a rough route you took

~~~
brianbreslin
is it like argus? [https://www.azumio.com/argus](https://www.azumio.com/argus)

------
beaker52
Last week: Dropbox

This week: Moves

Next week: Gmail... oh wait.

 _sigh_

~~~
FlacidPhil
Nobody bought Dropbox.. In fact Dropbox purchased Loom last week. I haven't
seen news about Facebook buying anyone since Oculus.

~~~
dan1234
They haven't been acquired but I think quite a few people were upset at the
news Dropbox had decided to appoint Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of
state, to the company's board of directors.

~~~
bduerst
Which was more likely a PR stunt for an upcoming IPO, but I digress.

------
nhangen
I didn't think anyone actually used this app. Anyone know how many active
users they had?

I tried to use it, but it killed my battery and couldn't catch things that my
Nike Fuelband could, since I don't take my phone to the gym, to run, etc.

Still, good on them for getting a piece of the pie.

I fail to understand why companies keep acquiring mobile app businesses, but
what do I know.

~~~
dirtyaura
They had lots of active users, reported numbers are in the ballpark. Lots of
users loved it, despite the battery problem. I use it. My main use case is not
the steps/activity tracking, but the automatic daily log and especially
location tracking. Once a month I combine Moves and git logs and they give
very good visibility to my daily work behavior. I've even used them even to
make accurate hour reporting for some customers.

The battery consumption isn't a problem if I don't move around the city all
day long, but if I do, I need a mobile battery charger.

Having worked with similar apps before, I can guarantee that the battery
problem is hard to solve well, I know that Moves team did the best they could
and their solution is world class.

------
joshstrange
>> 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.

I don't believe this for one second. Glad I have my Withings Pulse now so I
can drop the Moves app.

~~~
smackfu
Based on what?

