Facebook Wants to Workout With You

Rianna Babb | @HermioneTweeted Summer is just around the corner. Many of you are preparing to have a beach-ready body. Having a portable diary on a device that could help you track your activity would be helpful. The Apple Store has an app for that called “Moves."

Facebook recently bought "Moves," which is similar to Nike+ in that it tracks your walking, jogging, and running movements. Moves has a pedometer and can track your daily walk, jog, or bike ride on a map to review at a later time. Users are able to manually enter data and choose from 60+ types of activities being performed for better accuracy.

The Moves agreement originally said it would not be sharing your information to Facebook anytime soon. However, on May 5th, a few days after the acquisition, they altered the privacy policy. The most recent customer reviews on the Apple Store page give the app a single star, quoting the policy change and expressing their distaste for the duplicity. There are several other apps available that can connect to Moves to encompass more analytics of your health and fitness regimen. For example, connecting Moves to the Lifesum app allows you to track overall caloric intake and the amount of calories burned. It tracks what you’re eating with a bar code plus duration and intensity of exercise.

Facebook claims it needs to use the data it collects to perform technical maintenance and improve the customer experience with the app. Really, it’s about the word choice: “comingle” vs. “share.”

• Share = “it can't identify individual users, but rather receives a lump of faceless data that can be used to make the service work better for users,” according to TechTimes.com.

• Comingle = all user info goes to one place to identify the user and utilize info for tailored marketing.

So what do you think? Will you let Facebook become a part of your daily workout regime?