The unfortunate truth of today’s world is that many of you are job hunting. Potential employers, looking to hire someone who doesn’t spend Friday to Sunday double fisting drinks at seedy underground clubs, are increasingly opting to do some online research about their potential hires. This made Michael Devine uneasy, so much so that he used his programming skills to write a $3 Android app called Exfoliate. Once enabled you can set it to delete your Facebook wall posts, likes, comments, even posts you’ve left on friend’s walls, that are older than a user specified time period. The person you are now is likely not the person you were 2 or 3 years ago, yet Facebook knows exactly what you were up to back then. Run Exfoliate, and Facebook no longer has that data. Devine says:
“When you really think about it, it becomes clear that there’s actually no reason to leave anything (on Facebook) after a certain point in time because no one sees it or they rarely see it. It just sits there waiting for someone to see it out of context and then it can cause you trouble.”
Now if you’re Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then Exfoliate is an absolute nightmare. Facebook depends on you clicking everything you like and blurting out all of your random thoughts so that they can better serve you advertising. Delete your digital trail, and Facebook’s profile of you that they sell to advertisers becomes incomplete. Two months ago Facebook even showed off a future redesign of the service where your wall becomes a “Timeline” of everything you’ve done since birth. Exfoliate is the antithesis of Timeline, which we can imagine will make some of you extremely happy.
Expect an iPhone version to come out in a few weeks, though we really wish this app would become an online service that you have to just setup once and then it runs automatically every week or so.