Storage is nearly free today; so much like the NSA I'm sure facebook captures and stores everything. Plus it is text; if they had a space problem they could just compress it and store it to huge tapes if disks were too expensive to do that (probably not an issue for FB).
Great idea, I guess it could be useful for some people. Frankly, I probably wouldn't use it though, since I never really post anything that I think I'll regret later. And when I do, though, I end up manually deleting it.
What I'm afraid of is that something that seems totally innocuous now ends up being something that is 'bad' later... What's that? You shared a link to x? You must be a communist 2.0 McCarthyism.
Facebook is free! (So long as you're comfortable being the product.) I know, I'll create a new account with another service and then pay them to delete my history. Never mind that now yet another company, this time one without an obvious privacy policy, potentially has access to my personal info.
I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place. Of course typos and mistakes happen but I feel like those things can't really be scheduled.
I guess maybe having it permanently turning on during evening hours to prevent any lasting drunk tweets/posts - but it's the internet, once it's up there and embarrassing it's probably everywhere else too.
As someone who was just thinking about this concept a week or two ago, I can tell you how I viewed the use case. (And kudos to the developer who actually followed through with building it, unlike me!)
To me, it's about subverting the chilling effect that occurs when you're about to say something online and you think "could someone potentially use these words against me?" Not only governments or enemies with grudges, but even future employers with hair-trigger sensitivity doing some kind of background review. Many of us (if not all of us) have opinions or perspectives that may make others uncomfortable, and it seems unfortunate when we censor ourselves for the sake of maintaining a pristine public image.
One solution is to simply say whatever you want and then, if you reach a point where you sense that your persona may come under scrutiny (perhaps you're applying for jobs), go back and remove any material that you feel might be used against you.
The other solution is this concept of self-deleting messages. Instead of having to go back and find all the things you said that could be liabilities, simply give these comments a maximum lifetime when you make them. It's an efficiency thing. You save yourself the worry of "ah god what if I forget I said this and someone finds it down the road" and you avoid neurosis keeping you silent when you should be able to speak your mind. It seems like a win-win to me.
Sure, if somebody REALLY wanted to preserve your statements on the internet, they could do that. And this tool would basically be useless for celebrities or anyone with a significant following. But most of us aren't those people. Our public faces rarely come under scrutiny, but it would be helpful to have a tool that makes it easier to manage when they do.
Yeah, absolutely my thoughts. Many times I want to post something related to politics and as you know we all have some weird opinions, then a couple of days after that the post becomes obsolete.
I think your comment is assuming that something actually gets deleted permanently from social networks. That has been proven to not be the case.
Once something is published, the cat's out of the bag. Sure, for a person with few followers trying to guard their future, the risk is smaller than the celebrity in your example.
But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.
> But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.
Sure, that's valid. I guess I just don't see that risk as worth worrying about; I can't envision a scenario in which a future auditor (other than the government, perhaps) would resort to that kind of digital archeology to defeat my attempts at removing controversial statements.
It's possible that I'm just really underestimating how much the average person has their social media statements cached and replicated across the Internet in a public fashion, accessible by a simple search for their name. In my opinion, if you say something and then have a program "delete" it after 48 hours, future employers or adversaries aren't going to see it unless:
a) they happen to work for the social network in question and see no problem in digging through their own databases/backups
b) they're a government agency with access to troves of archived communications
Considering I find both scenarios to be fairly unethical, I don't think I'd want to seek employment from company A or government agency B to begin with.
Of course, when we're talking about governments as adversaries, the rules go out the window. I'm talking more about barely controversial statements made by average citizens who might be a little concerned with how future employers view their public persona. I think that's a valid use case.
I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place.
Twitter, for me, has the feel of an impromptu off-the-cuff conversation with some odd, semi-random, group of people.
It encourages the offhand remark, things that make sense and have value (hopefully) at a given time. When tweeted, a comment is valuable to the owner and the readers, but as time passes and the context is lost the value and meaning changes.
I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.
> I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.
That makes a lot of sense. I could absolutely see the usefulness of an option to delete tweets that have taken place in a conversation where previous tweets had been deleted.
Sure it could be abused, but it wouldn't leave any out-of-context updates out there.
A lot of tweets have no value without context and many times that context can simply be timing. This is especially true during live events like the Superbowl or Oscars. Those tweets might have immense immediate value, but they lose almost all value once that live event has passed. If you want a perfectly currated feed that allows users to go back and read your tweet history (or you expect someone might do that as part of a hiring decision) I could certainly see value in clearing out those tweets that are now worthless without their original context.
A tweet from 4 years ago: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
Years later the conclusion of the media frenzy was that Pax Dickonson was a great big racist, because no one recognized that he was mocking Mel Gibson.
I was thinking about a product like this marketed at new parents. A lot of people like to post pictures of their kids but I can imagine situations where removing these pictures some time in the future would be really beneficial.
Imagine you post a bunch cute pictures of little Jonny as a toddler. Maybe when little Jonny is in high school he doesn't want classmates to be able to find every "cute" picture of him that his mom wanted to share with her friends and family. Obviously once those pictures are "out there" they're potentially out there, but something like this could help, especially for situations years later.
I can remember (mid-90s) when we thought it was downright scandalous that one of our friends had on his website something to the effect of "About: My name is John Doe and I live at 123 Sesame St. Anytown, AL 00000. If you'd like to send me a letter, I'll respond. If you'd like to stalk me... that information was already available to you."
It's a good concept, but posting using a third-party website is an inconvenience.
A simpler way of doing could be for the user to just add hashtags to their statuses (e.g. #12h or #7d), and have the service read and delete statuses accordingly.
In general, security is never perfect, so imagining the perfect binary "secure or insecure" isn't useful.
Instead, think about it in levels. Is something secure from a casual observer? Is it secure from your teenager who can devote a lot of time to it? What about a professional who devotes a lot of time to it? What about a court order? What about a concerted effort from the government to build an ASIC farm to crack your encryption?
You could look at this in the same way. Is your tweet visible to a casual observer? Is it available to a dedicated searcher? Is it available to a technically competent outside searcher? Is it available to police without a warrant? Is it available to someone with superadmin on the database inside Twitter?
When you think about it that way, the general utility of the service should be obvious.
Google "tweet delete all" and see how many web sites already do this. This isn't a naysayer post about your work, but rather a curious observation that maybe these services aren't that well known (or used?). IDK, maybe that gives you a space to take over.
I think the use of the word 'delete' should not be taken literally. I believe that Facebook for example simply archives your content for posterity (and the NSA) and then marks your photo record as 'hidden'. It then removes the actual photo from the CDN.
Well, that's what I would do if I was in the business of classifying every person on the planet for advertising purposes and security/population control.
/sarcasm
Wow! what a deal! give away your login and password to a third party which will tell facebook to hide your user provided content from others users after a while. Until facebook makes this third party forbidden and shuts it down.
/sarcasm off
it's not the facebook users you should mind but facebook itself, though facebook users are scary for using facebook and giving away all their data in the first place.
Facebook is not deleting anything anyway, and will continue to sell your data long after you "blanked" your profile and all its content.
Nice idea and very neat execution. I like the self-destruct aspect which would help be get excited if you offer them something(think couponing..etc). Personnally I can see myself using it when tweating something very particular and contextual (i.e. agenda of a conference which updates automatically when we progress during the day)
49 comments
[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 1884 ms ] threadSorry, I'll show myself out.
with the free plan you can schedule up to 5 tweets and 5 facebook status at a time
I'm really curious because for me personally, if I were to delete something later then my opinion is that I shouldn't have posted it in the first place. Of course typos and mistakes happen but I feel like those things can't really be scheduled.
I guess maybe having it permanently turning on during evening hours to prevent any lasting drunk tweets/posts - but it's the internet, once it's up there and embarrassing it's probably everywhere else too.
To me, it's about subverting the chilling effect that occurs when you're about to say something online and you think "could someone potentially use these words against me?" Not only governments or enemies with grudges, but even future employers with hair-trigger sensitivity doing some kind of background review. Many of us (if not all of us) have opinions or perspectives that may make others uncomfortable, and it seems unfortunate when we censor ourselves for the sake of maintaining a pristine public image.
One solution is to simply say whatever you want and then, if you reach a point where you sense that your persona may come under scrutiny (perhaps you're applying for jobs), go back and remove any material that you feel might be used against you.
The other solution is this concept of self-deleting messages. Instead of having to go back and find all the things you said that could be liabilities, simply give these comments a maximum lifetime when you make them. It's an efficiency thing. You save yourself the worry of "ah god what if I forget I said this and someone finds it down the road" and you avoid neurosis keeping you silent when you should be able to speak your mind. It seems like a win-win to me.
Sure, if somebody REALLY wanted to preserve your statements on the internet, they could do that. And this tool would basically be useless for celebrities or anyone with a significant following. But most of us aren't those people. Our public faces rarely come under scrutiny, but it would be helpful to have a tool that makes it easier to manage when they do.
Once something is published, the cat's out of the bag. Sure, for a person with few followers trying to guard their future, the risk is smaller than the celebrity in your example.
But the risk of a bot snapping a shot of the statement before it gets deleted outweighs the reward of posting ephemerally, at least for me.
Sure, that's valid. I guess I just don't see that risk as worth worrying about; I can't envision a scenario in which a future auditor (other than the government, perhaps) would resort to that kind of digital archeology to defeat my attempts at removing controversial statements.
It's possible that I'm just really underestimating how much the average person has their social media statements cached and replicated across the Internet in a public fashion, accessible by a simple search for their name. In my opinion, if you say something and then have a program "delete" it after 48 hours, future employers or adversaries aren't going to see it unless:
a) they happen to work for the social network in question and see no problem in digging through their own databases/backups
b) they're a government agency with access to troves of archived communications
Considering I find both scenarios to be fairly unethical, I don't think I'd want to seek employment from company A or government agency B to begin with.
Of course, when we're talking about governments as adversaries, the rules go out the window. I'm talking more about barely controversial statements made by average citizens who might be a little concerned with how future employers view their public persona. I think that's a valid use case.
Twitter, for me, has the feel of an impromptu off-the-cuff conversation with some odd, semi-random, group of people.
It encourages the offhand remark, things that make sense and have value (hopefully) at a given time. When tweeted, a comment is valuable to the owner and the readers, but as time passes and the context is lost the value and meaning changes.
I like the idea of enforcing a public ephemerality on things that are created within a specific time and context.
That makes a lot of sense. I could absolutely see the usefulness of an option to delete tweets that have taken place in a conversation where previous tweets had been deleted.
Sure it could be abused, but it wouldn't leave any out-of-context updates out there.
Mel Gibson, 4 years ago: "You Look Like A F---Cking Pig In Heat And If You Get Raped By A Pack Of N---Ers It Will Be your fault"
http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...
A tweet from 4 years ago: "In The Passion Of The Christ 2, Jesus gets raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though."
Years later the conclusion of the media frenzy was that Pax Dickonson was a great big racist, because no one recognized that he was mocking Mel Gibson.
Imagine you post a bunch cute pictures of little Jonny as a toddler. Maybe when little Jonny is in high school he doesn't want classmates to be able to find every "cute" picture of him that his mom wanted to share with her friends and family. Obviously once those pictures are "out there" they're potentially out there, but something like this could help, especially for situations years later.
Much like people use their real name online as opposed to 10+years ago
A simpler way of doing could be for the user to just add hashtags to their statuses (e.g. #12h or #7d), and have the service read and delete statuses accordingly.
Instead, think about it in levels. Is something secure from a casual observer? Is it secure from your teenager who can devote a lot of time to it? What about a professional who devotes a lot of time to it? What about a court order? What about a concerted effort from the government to build an ASIC farm to crack your encryption?
You could look at this in the same way. Is your tweet visible to a casual observer? Is it available to a dedicated searcher? Is it available to a technically competent outside searcher? Is it available to police without a warrant? Is it available to someone with superadmin on the database inside Twitter?
When you think about it that way, the general utility of the service should be obvious.
I can't imagine how mad the big guys (Facebook, Twitter, etc) would be if this service grew big
Well, that's what I would do if I was in the business of classifying every person on the planet for advertising purposes and security/population control.
it's not the facebook users you should mind but facebook itself, though facebook users are scary for using facebook and giving away all their data in the first place. Facebook is not deleting anything anyway, and will continue to sell your data long after you "blanked" your profile and all its content.