On New Year's Day, you may have woken up only to be greeted by something truly terrible: a slew of embarrassing texts sent while you were in, shall we say, high spirits on New Year's Eve.
If that was the case, you were then probably hit by the harsh reality that there's no way to undo all of those texts. Well, there wasn't... until now.
Strings is a new messaging app that allows you to permanently delete texts from your phone and anyone you sent the message to. The app, which is free to download and is currently only available for iOS devices, also lets you control when friends can download photos or videos by requiring them to ask you for permission before downloading any content. So now it's truly up to you where that unflattering photo ends up online. This works with texts and emails on Strings, too.
The only catch is that you and the person you're communicating with have to both download and use the app in order for any of this to work. Strings won't be able to delete messages you send through iMessage or Snapchat.
Strings was created by Seattle-based startup incubator Be Labs, whose co-founders Edward Balassanian and Damon Ganem were "frustrated with the state of today's personal communication options," according to Strings' website. The impetus for Strings also seems to be a response to the apps and social networks that use your data to suggest posts and show you certain ads catered to the information you share.
"On Strings, you own your content. Not us. Not advertisers. You decide who sees your content. Not us. Not advertisers," according to a post on Strings' official blog. "You pull all the Strings."
Of course, we're all a bit cautious about what we share with others these days, at least you should be. With the recent Sony hacks, the Snapchat photo leak in October and the celebrity nude photo leak through iCloud at the end of the summer last year, we've all seen how vulnerable anything we share online is to making its way to an unintended recipient.
Still, Strings claims that the content that gets deleted on the app is removed "immediately and permanently," so hopefully if you want it gone, it's gone for good.
Image: Garry Knight / Flickr
