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.
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.
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.