Three computer science researchers from the University of Kent in the US have developed an app that allows Facebook members to "wash" their Facebook name of the "sins" of their youth. Facewa.sh is based on a blacklist of "bad" words associated with the user's name.
Daniel Gur, Camden Fullmer, and David Steinberg developed the app as part of a two-day hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania that took place on January 19.
- Facewa.sh is currently in beta and only supports English. However, its creators have seen that their app has been very popular (it already has 9,200 users on Facebook) and have stated that they will expand its capabilities and support more languages.
Facewa.sh requests authorization to access the user's News Feed posts and looks for "offensive material" in comments posted on their wall, in photos they have been tagged in, in photos they have uploaded, in links, in photos they have Liked, in Status Updates they have posted, and in pages they are a fan of.
As the creators of Facewa.sh explain, their goal was to clean up the "dirty" history of people who lavishly shared embarrassing details from their youthful experiences on Facebook and are now looking for work, but are afraid that they will be confronted with their past when a potential employer searches for them on the social network.
The “Dirty” Word List includes words like sex or drugs, but the user can enter their own to later clean up or hide the relevant posts.
