Is your Facebook page running with vulgar & embarrassing feeds/pics? Get ‘Facewash’

Now, there is an application that can help Facebook users to clean up vulgar or embarrassing pages from their profile.

Developers said"You spent the last four years being a college kid," their site explains. "And that's wonderful. But a lot can happen in four years, and the internet never forgets. . . . Wash away all those dirty little jokes and beer talk, those late night snapshots, those forgotten 'likes.'"

The "Facewash" app developed by researchers from Kent State University will search through a user's Facebook activity and content for items that the user may want to hide or delete. in a matter of days, their web app has become a hit. Their site, http://facewa.sh, attracted 135,000 visitors as of Wednesday.

"We realised that there's a lot of content that perhaps someone might not want a future employer to see," researcher Daniel Gur.

Gur created the Facewash over the weekend along his two friends and fellow computer science majors Camden Fullmer, and David Steinberg. The trio built the app in less than two days while at a hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania.

Facewash is still in beta phase so users may encounter minor glitches for some time.

"This is your face on the Internet, and you might need to wash it," Gur said.

How Facewash Works

Facewash application first connects to your Facebook account like any other Facebook app. So in that case, you have to give it permission to look through everything in your account. If you're concerned at all about connecting third-party apps on Facebook, rest assured you can remove the app when you're done with it. 

The tool largely automates the process of finding questionable content, although it doesn't automatically delete or hide it for you, which is good. You ought to be able to decide for yourself on a case-by-case basis after evaluation.

In any event, when you click "start" for the first time, you can sit back and let the app do the work. It will scour your account in search of bad words, which include profanity and many other words that may or may not have a negative connotation depending on context, "suck" being a prime example. 

The app can search both English and Spanish, although not simultaneously. It claims to look through you’re:

• status updates,
• photos (although with limitations, explained below),
• ‘liked’ links,
• ‘liked’ photos,
• photos in which you've been tagged,
• pages, and
• timeline.

Say you're going to a job interview at a company, and you want to be sure your Facebook account doesn't reference that employer or any of its products in a negative light. You can use Facewash to search for any terms of your choosing, such as brand names, employer names, or really anything at all. It displays results the same way, and again, you have to link through to Facebook to actually change the settings to remove the activity.