A new mobile application claims to have remove all traces of ex-partners from personal profiles on social networking site Facebook.
Killswitch will, claim its makers, trawl users’ profiles for all material featuring an identified ex-partner, including videos, photos, status updates and wall posts. Once these have been gathered, users of the app will be able to remove everything or select particular content for removal. All the targeted content is moved to a special private folder in the user’s Facebook profile.
Developers ClearHart Digital say this secret folder will give users the option to revisit the relationships at a later date:
“…so users can laugh about them after they have moved on (and the ex at hand has ballooned, balded and probably taken a position at the Cheesecake Factory).”
ClearHart’s Erica Mannherz said:
“This app is intended as an assertion of independence and healing mechanism for the KillSwitcher. It’s meant to help the user reclaim their little corner of the Internet — their Facebook profile…” Can we ever really invest in a new relationship while evidence of our past ones remain etched into the peripheries of our digital lives?”
Features planned for future version of the app include a ‘breakup severity slide’, which would allow users to select Facebook content for removal based on the nature of the break-up.
Mannherz explained: “Users can determine what content is deleted based on how bad the breakup was. Slide it one way if it was amicable, and it’ll keep group pictures with your ex, for instance. If he or she tore your heart out and ran it over with a skateboard, slide the other way and it’ll wipe ‘em all.”
Killswitch is currently available for Android devices, with a version for iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad “coming soon”.
A ‘kill switch’ is a mechanism used to shut down devices or programmes in an emergency.
This is interesting. An app that helps us to clean up our Facebook profile in effect, quite thoroughly so it seems. So if we have, say, a group photo with an ex…how would the program identify the photo? Is is based on some type of OCR of the visual contents of images/photos or is it merely to detect text that relates to an ex?