Digital Smarts - All Clear
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Ethan Czahor had always wanted to work in politics, but his dream job as chief technology officer collapsed 36 hours after getting a job with the Jeb Bush campaign because of what were deemed a series of offensive tweets and blog posts. Now Czahor is introducing Clear, an app designed to keep what happened to him from happening to anyone else. The recently-released app scours a user’s Twitter, Facebook and Instagram histories for potentially inflammatory or damaging posts, and makes their removal easy. It’s designed for the next generation in the workforce, who grew up sharing vast amounts of information online, some of which may become a liability in the college admissions process or their future careers. While Czahor says that people should be held accountable for racist and other offensive postings, he says he designed Clear for that universe of embarrassing messages that can simply be taken out of context. Of course it is important to remember that posts not marked as private may have been captured in public archives and would thus be out of the reach of the app’s delete feature. There are already plans for updates to expand the app’s reach to emails, personal blogs, and search results. As Czahor says “You as a person exist in a lot of places on the Internet, and I just feel that you have the right to at least know what’s out there, and to take care of it.”