Need to clean up your Facebook profile? Get a ‘Facewash’
Got a Facebook profile with vulgarities or embarrassing pages you shouldn’t have liked? Now there’s a way to clean them up.
A trio of Kent State University undergrads have put together the “Facewash†app that’ll 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.
“We realized that there’s a lot of content that perhaps someone might not want a future employer to see,†Daniel Gur, 22, said Wednesday.
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Gur created the app over the weekend with two friends and fellow computer science majors from his school -- Camden Fullmer, 21, and David Steinberg, 24. The three students built Facewash 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.
It’s still in beta phase so users may encountered minor glitches.
Since launching Sunday, Facewash has received more than 20,000 unique visitors, Gur said.
The three students said they hope to keep expanding Facewash and keep adding features to it. Next up, Gur said the team wants to make Facewash capable of looking for content in other languages so more people can use it.
As for how they came up with the name, Gur said it just fit so perfectly.
“This is your face on the Internet, and you might need to wash it,†he said.
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