Considering the increasingly social online world we are living in, there are moments when we update statuses or tweets or pictures which may seem fun at the time, but in retrospect can be embarrassing. Some posts can even cost you your jobs. Like it happened with the developer of Clear, an app that helps you delete those cringe-inducing statuses from your social networks.

Image: Ethan Czahor

Clear basically connects with your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts and analyses your history so far. It will flag certain posts which the app thinks has inappropriate content. To separate out these posts from the harmless ones, Clear uses a combination of algorithms and IBM supercomputer Watson to filter results.

App developer of Clear, Ethan Czahor, made this app after he lost a job because of his tweets. Czahor who joined as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for American politician Jeb Bush’s campaign, had to resign from his post after a series of tweets from last couple of years were unearthed. In his defence, Czahor says that he was part of an improv comedy group back in the day and the tweets were meant to be joke material, which was taken out of context.

Czahor developed Clear, which identifies certain keywords and also zeros in on posts that mentions groups of people, such as women, LGBT community, nationalities and so on.

Sentiment analysis is done by IBM’s Watson which highlights posts with negative language. You then get a score at the end depending on how many posts have been flagged. You can then proceed to delete those posts.

According to Czahor quoted in Mashable, the app is still a work in progress and the accuracy will increase over time. In the near future Clear will also support identification of offensive or embarrassing photos.

The app is currently in Beta and is available on the iOS platform. You will be put on a waiting list before the app will be available to be downloaded.

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