Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)’s Disappearing Posts and the Virtues of Hiding in Public

Last year on Valentine’s Day, an old friend from college who had just become a mom, updated her Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) status with an emotional post. In the status, she was telling her Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) family that her husband had forgotten the holiday. On the other hand, a girl I’ve known since I was a child posted some pictures of herself wearing a sensual Santa outfit on December 9, 2009. Later on, she updated her status and wrote that she had a bad hangover. A few hours later, she had some Nutella. The reason I know all this is because even now, I see the same kind of updates. Although the writers of these statuses can remove them, it would entail going deep into their timelines to try to retrieve them. These writers are either not bothered or don’t even remember the statuses they updated.

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is in the process of evaluating a feature that lets people post status updates that have a built in expiry date that ranges between an hour and goes up to a week. This may enable people to delete any embarrassing updates – shaming the husband or hangover declarations – they may have posted so they will not be permanent reminders of awkward situations, if they want to. This may help people whose social media profiles help attorneys, law enforcement authorities and employers decide custody and hiring issues.

Jennifer Golbeck, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, finds it fascinating that Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is changing its earlier cultural philosophy that privacy is a thing of the past and people should let others in on their lives all the time. People were not ready to compromise on their privacy and did not react well to this philosophy. It took a while for Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) to understand that people still want their lives to remain private, but now they understand this fact all too well.

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Golbeck, who researches social media data, is working on a scheme that may be able to identify depression through the posts people post on Twitter (TWTR). She is astounded on a regular basis by the amount of things people share on social media. It’s not just the visibly embarrassing status updates that are challenging. Nowadays, data analysts study people’s incidental wall posts on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) so they may determine their personalities, political inclinations, mental issues and potential usage of drugs. This analysis does not mean data analysts just look for status updates that exchange posts on bongs.

Golbeck’s extensive study on social media websites has made her more concerned about the extent to which people share information on the internet. Golbeck managed to reform some of the habits she practices as well. In 2013, she saw that she had 30,000 Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) likes, updates and wall post comments to search through if she felt she needed to monitor her own online past.

She deleted everything after manually deleting posts from timeline for 12 hours and even looked for a program that would automatically delete posts; however, without any success.

If Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) applies this feature that enables people to delete their status updates, it would make online exchanges brief and temporary. Facebook (NASDAQ:FB)’s Slingshot application removes posts after being read by the receiver, and Snapchat works with disappearing photographs.

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One thing to keep in mind is that even though updates and wall posts are deleted and cannot be seen, it does not mean that they have been totally erased. Twitter and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) retains archives of just about anything and everything. Snapchat was in the news during the early part of this year when people become aware that the photographs sent through it were not completely deleted, just concealed from view. Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) can even save those status updates that you wrote but then did not post. Golbeck alleviates people’s fears by stating that the data that it saves does not go beyond Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), and they do not use it, even though divorce lawyers are probably going through other’s Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) profiles, at least not for the time being.