iOS App Secret Lets You Further Distance Yourself from Your Posts
Less than a month after the iOS app Secret reached Silicon Valley stardom, its developers have released an update that makes your posts even more anonymous than they already supposedly were. Secret has added a new “unlink” button, which erases the data trail between you and your existing posts on the company’s servers, Secret announced Friday.
Per its blog post:
“It takes a lot of courage to share your innermost thoughts* and feelings.** If you’re ever worried about something you’ve posted, there’s now a ‘big red button’ that will remove any association between you and all of your previous posts on our servers.”
The catch? You’ll no longer be able to receive activity notifications, delete or comment as a crowned author on secrets you’ve officially shunned.
For the uninitiated, Secret is an app that allows you to share thoughts and photos anonymously with your friends, friends of friends and (in some cases) strangers. It’s sort of like Twitter, if you had no idea who was posting anything.
Obviously, the main concern here is privacy. Because the app uses the contacts in your phone book as a way to identify who’s in your friend circle, most everyone has predicted that Secret would eventually be hacked. The founders of Secret insist that their creation is as secure as your email. But as we all well know, email accounts gets hacked.
That’s probably why the developers at Secret have opted to let users wash their hands of posts altogether. The more distance you have from that nasty thing you posted about your roommate, the less chance there is she’ll figure it out and stick your toothbrush in the toilet.
A few other updates let you do the following:
– Swipe left on posts to follow them (because sometimes you want to secretly stalk without liking or commenting).
– Swipe right on posts to heart them.
– Flag content you find inappropriate. (Like all those House of Cards spoilers I saw this week. Thanks for that, jerks.)
– Remove secrets from your stream. If the secret is your own, it’ll be removed from everyone’s stream.
If you’re new to the app altogether, check out my beginner’s guide to Secret here.
* candid musings on how to properly go to the bathroom
** veiled and bitter messages to exes
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