'Facewash' to clean up FB profile
Researchers have developed a new app that can help Facebook users clean up vulgar or embarrassing pages from their profile.
The “Facewash” app developed by researchers from Kent State University will search through a user’s Facebook activity and content for items that the user may want to hide or delete.
That could include status updates, photo captions, and comments users left or received as well as pages and links that were liked, Los Angeles Times reported.
“We realised that there’s a lot of content that perhaps someone might not want a future employer to see,” researcher Daniel Gur.
Gur created the Facewash over the weekend along his two friends and fellow computer science majors - Camden Fullmer, and David Steinberg. The trio built the app in less than two days while at a hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania.
To use Facewash, users first need to go to its website, Facewa.sh, click “Get Started” and log into their Facebook account if they aren’t logged in already.
The user will be prompted to click “Go to App” and then give the app permission to access the user’s contents.
Search for a term and the app starts looking through all of the user’s profile content. If Facewash finds a match, it’ll show it to the user and link the posts so the user can easily delete a status or remove a picture.
Facewash is still in beta phase so users may encounter minor glitches for some time.
The recently launched app has already received more than 20,000 unique visitors, Gur said.
The undergrads hope to keep expanding Facewash and keep adding features to it. Gur said the team wants to make Facewash capable of looking for content in other languages so more people can use it.
“This is your face on the Internet, and you might need to wash it,” Gur said.
