Know where I’m going

Screen Shot 2014-05-14 at 09.17.01

This map shows all my movements from January 1st 2014 to right now. The data were collected by the app Moves and the map generated by Move-O-Scope.

To me this is absolutely awesome.

Running Moves significantly reduces the battery life on my iPhone 5, but it’s something I have been willing to live with because I just love the data that gets collected and the way Moves displays it.

Walking patterns in our neighborhood
Walking patterns in our neighborhood

Then Moves was bought by Facebook.

When Facebook bought Instagram I thought: “Oh, well… the pictures I was posting to Instagram were public anyway”. I was a bit annoyed with how they treated the integration with Twitter, but this was pretty much it.

When Facebook bought Whatsapp I thought: “Oh, well… I have never used Whatsapp anyway”.

But I do feel uncomfortable about Facebook buying Moves and having access to their data. Strangely enough giving all the information about my moving around to a tiny and unknown Finnish company felt better than giving it to a huge American one.

My walking patterns in London
My walking patterns in London

I haven’t deleted the application yet, but I guess that I will do as soon as I will find a replacement which works as smoothly as Moves. Or maybe I will just live with it.

What is certain is that I will keep running a tracking application on my phone.