Perhaps this happened to you too. You wake up in the morning after a night of not-so-light drinking only to discover that you somehow managed to text your mother, and just about everyone else, very unflattering photos of yourself.
Embarrassing for sure, but if you had shared them using the Strings app, you just might able to do some damage control. That's because the app allows you to take back text messages or photos that you should not have sent in the first place.
In order to function, the app has to be installed not only on your smartphone, but also on the mobile devices your friends are using. Understandably, it will not work on just anyone on your contacts list, but if you can persuade some of your family, friends, or colleagues to use the app, it could help save some of your face after some careless texting or photo sharing.
Of course, there are other existing apps out there that work in a similar fashion. For instance, the Cluster app lets you take down photos, but anybody you share with can download a photo to their mobile device once the image is put in a private folder you share with them. As for Cyber Dust messages and Snapchat photos, they usually vanish once they are shared, but you can no longer retrieve them once they are gone. With the Strings app, you can share messages and photos but also get to have the option of either keeping the stuff you share or deleting them when you feel like not keeping them forever.
Another good thing about the Strings app is that apart from text messages and photos, it also allows users to send (and take back) videos of any length.
The developers of the Strings app also stress that all deleted content is gone quickly and for good. This means that it is deleted from the sender's phone, the recipient's phone, and from all existing Strings servers. So if you are having second thoughts about taking down any message, photo, or video, you need to be really careful because once it is erased, it is going to stay erased forever.
Now, some users may still feel a little bit skeptical. With the iCloud photos hack early last year and the Snappening (wherein 200,000 photos on Snapchat were leaked) last October, they have every right to be. To avoid sure embarrassment, we just have to learn to be more cautious in anything we share.
