Facebook is taking over the world, one acquisition at a time. Its newest purchase is fitness tracking app Moves, which tracks user movements and determines whether users are walking, running, biking, or driving. Days after the acquisition, Moves changed its privacy policy, raising instant concerns.

Moves’ original privacy policy stated the company would not disclose data to third parties without legal obligation or consent, and their company announcement stated there would be no “comingling of data” after the acquisition.

Despite that claim, 11 days later they swiftly changed their privacy policy to allow the app to “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).”

Implications of the acquisition

With the acquisition of Moves, Facebook can use your offline, daily routine to send you targeted advertisements online. While Moves was a very useful and beautiful app, we at Abine suggest avoiding using apps acquired by Facebook, because their privacy policy is all of a sudden subject to change.

Since the start of 2014, Facebook has acquired 5 companies for over $20 billion dollars. The sizable investments made in these companies must prove profitable in the end. Moves’ millions of users are extremely valuable to Facebook because of the amount of information the app has stored on them. Facebook knows them more intimately and can better target them.

What would you do if an app you used was acquired by Facebook and instantly changed its policy?