If you've participated in popular culture at all over the past couple of years, you know that anonymous apps are all the rage with the kids these days. Being able to share or say whatever you want without having it traced back to you is appealing to many for obvious reasons.
While apps like Snapchat and Secret might be two of the best-known anonymous apps out there today, their ability to keep your data truly anonymous and private has come into question on several occasions. But Unseen wants you to know it's not like the other guys.
"We are one of the only anonymous apps that exist, specifically as it relates to anonymous social media apps," said Michael Schramm, the CEO of Austin-based startup Bearch, the company behind Unseen, in a phone interview with T-Lounge. "We're anonymous, and we're really the only ones that are anonymous."
Though many anonymous apps protect your identity, they still collect data about you, such as your email address, phone number or geo-location. Unseen doesn't do that.
One of the reasons the app was created was to counteract how social media has come to allow us to present "super-glossy, artifical" versions of ourselves, according to Schramm. He compares traditional social media sites to refrigerators where we only display the photos in which we look the best or the happiest but that may not be the most representative of our true selves because we are so easily identifiable online.
However, you do have to share something about yourself if you actually want to interact with others on Unseen: where you go to school. Content is currently grouped by college (more than 200 in the United States and Canada are represented in the app right now), and only those who belong to a college's group can share photos, comment or up or down vote posts. The app has a one-way cache that encrypts the IP address attached to what you post, making it completely useless, and even so, it would still be pretty hard to narrow down a post from one of the 50,000-plus students that attend a school the size of Texas A&M, for instance. You could also just lie about what school you attend.
Still, you do elect to share that data about yourself. When you first open the app, you tell it which college's group you want to belong to, and then you can start checking out what your classmates have posted to your school's feed. If your college doesn't have enough users signed up yet, it'll be put on a waiting list until an undisclosed amount of people from that school sign up. This is obviously meant as an incentive for you to invite your friends to use the app.
In the meantime, you can lurk on the feeds of the other schools. That also means people that don't attend college at all can see posts on Unseen. That may sound a little creepy at first, but Schramm explained that's really no different from any other app or social network where anyone from any community can see any user's posts.
"I'm sure there are people that download the app, and they don't go to that specific college, but it hasn't been an issue in any way," Schramm said.
In fact, Unseen users actually seem pretty excited when someone not from the community posts in their school's thread. For instance, one user, who said he or she wasn't a Harvard student, posted a photo of his or her home country of Scotland. The photo received a positive reaction from users who wrote "Idk why but I love this pic!" and "I wanna see more pics of [sic] scotland..."
Schramm, who created the app with co-founder Munjal Budhabhatti, said he eventually intends for the app to be used by people all over the world. He declined to say how many users Unseen currently has, but its user base has grown almost 22 percent week over week since it launched last spring.
As one might expect with anonymous apps, most of the posts on Unseen are not very PG. Whether you're scrolling through a private or public school, one located in the northeast or in the south, it looks like college students have one thing on their minds: sex. There are text posts that ask for sexual favors and photos of women posing in just a bra and panties. While users also post everything from photos of their dorm rooms to food to study sessions in the library, having the freedom to post whatever you want without the fear of censorship or consequences is really what Unseen is all about, according to Schramm.
"I think, look, if you've got an issue with the content on Unseen, and this is something we encourage even students themselves, be the change you want to see," Schramm said. "We don't create a meaningful community by silencing people and removing all the content that could potentially cause some questions."
However, Unseen is not completely free from restrictions. There is "thoughtful, light moderation" on the app, Schramm said. In fact, when you first sign on, a page outlining its terms of use pops up. Posts that contain graphic content (pornography, genitalia, nipples) bullying and harassment (racial or sexual slurs) or spam and advertising (soliciting sexual favors) will be removed. However, you can still see posts advertising sexual favors or showing topless women with stars over their nipples.
"If you're simply saying something or sharing something on Unseen with just explicit hate, we work very hard to diligently remove that content," Schramm said. "But content that is controversial is very different, because just because someone doesn't necessarily agree with someone's view or someone's opinion doesn't mean it's not right to be shared. And so as long as you're contributing to this community, which is really what Unseen is, we're OK with that."
One just hopes that Unseen's community will prove to be about much more.
