Scan your Facebook profile for undesirable contents
Facebook does not forget. What may have been funny after a night of drinking and partying or while you were in college, may not be suitable anymore when you are trying to score your dream job or marrying the man or woman of your dreams. While you can go ahead and try to clean everything up manually, it may be a bothersome and long winded process and the chance that you miss data is ever present.
Facewash is a new service that is scans your Facebook profile for you. Profile in this regard not only means what you have uploaded or published on the profile but also what others may have added to it via comments for instance.
The first thing you need to do to get started is to authorize the app to access data of your Facebook account including your stream but also personal information. Once done you are redirected to a website where you can start the scan of your profile. The app by default scans the following areas:
- Comments posted on your wall
- Comments on photos you are tagged in
- Photos that you have posted
- Links that you have liked
- Photos that you have liked
- Status updates you have posted
- Pages that you are a fan of
The application uses its own word list to scan the various areas on Facebook. The developers do not reveal what the word list includes but mention that it "spans a broad spectrum of 'dirtiness' from sex to drugs to curse words and more". If English is not the main language that you communicate in on Facebook you may want to use the second option the app makes available. You can enter your own list of words that you want to scan your profile for. To do so enter a list of comma separated words and phrases and click on the start button afterwards.
The scan may take a couple of minutes either way depending much on your and your friend's activity on Facebook. If you post once every year you are probably done in a couple of seconds, if you are a daily poster with lots of friends who do that too, you may wait more than a couple of minutes for the results to be displayed to you
Verdict
If you do not mind handing out a couple of rights to the app you may find it quite useful to scan your profile for contents that you may not want to see associated with it. I could not really get the custom word list option to work, it somehow did not return any hits even though I selected words that were listed on the profile. (via)
Interesting service. Definitely a market for it, not sure if I would use it myself but a good idea.
On an unrelated note I am really liking the new verdict box …
…marrying the man or woman. Women is plural of woman.
I try to keep my account in check “as I go”, so there is no need for this kind of app for me. But if you have an old account, or one with a lot of content, it might come in handy.
Same in my case.