Try these apps to avoid summer shame
Lee Suckling offers some advice to prevent you broadcasting embarrassing holiday antics.
Inhibitions often go out the door during summer, as we all relax. Unfortunately, this can also mean we get ourselves into embarrassing situations we’d rather see buried.
Your phone is able to help you in many situations, as a preventive measure and after the fact.
Here are all the apps that will help you maintain your decorum while the days are long and you’re at liberty with your time.
As for preventive options, many apps cater for ‘‘drunk behaviour’’ and can be helpful to prevent you broadcasting your holiday antics.
Drunk Mode (Android, iOS) hides select contacts’ information for up to 12 hours so you can’t contact them – something useful if there are particular people in your life who you unwisely call or text.
It also has a ‘‘Find My Drunk’’ feature which is like Find My Friends for when you lose your mates. Both of these can come in useful even if you’re sober, especially if you happen to be under the influence of the hot Kiwi sun.
The app Drunk Blocker(Android) goes one step further by locking you out of chosen social media apps (eg Facebook, Snapchat) so you can’t post to them.
While clearly intended for inebriated users, both apps can wisely be applied while on holiday in general – especially for people prone to annoyingly Snapchatting every moment of their spare time.
For Twitter users, there’s a helpful in-app feature that prevents you from tweeting out something it suspects is supposed to be a private Direct Message.
When you mistakenly type ‘‘DM’’ in the regular tweet box, you are presented with an alert saying ‘‘You’re Tweeting This’’ and warning you you’re about to broadcast to the entire world, not a single recipient. This only works on Twitter’s mobile apps, not the Twitter website.
There are also good apps out there for smartphone addicts who don’t trust themselves, period, and need some help limiting their usage over the summer.
All of these can be perfect for people who fear embarrassing themselves with poor digital impulse control.
For example, Offtime (Android, iOS) cuts off usage to certain apps (of your choosing) that you find problematic. AppDetox (Android) is another good option to lay off the screen time over the summer: it allows you to embark on your own digital detox.
Moment (iOS) automatically tracks your smartphone use and lets you set a daily limit, and you’ll be notified/forced off your device when you’ve been using it too long. Similarly, Breakfree (Android, iOS) can tell you how many times a day you unlock your phone to check for new alerts.
For those really worried about making a fool of themselves this summer, Flipd lets you lock your phone for a certain time and will not let you access it until that period is complete.
As for apps that can help prevent embarrassment after something has already happened, there are also some options.
Whatsapp recently launched a new feature which redacts unread messages. This is something absent from all other messaging services (except Blackberry’s BBM, which few use any more).
This is ideal for messages you send by mistake – say, to the wrong person, or the wrong Whatsapp group – and also obviously for messages you later decide were not appropriate (the blue tick read receipt system on Whatsapp lets you know if a message has been seen or not).
This capability hasn’t been rolled out to all Whatsapp users yet so individuals should check if the ‘‘delete for everyone’’ option comes up when they tap and hold over any message.
And there are some other warnings: both parties need to have the latest version of Whatsapp installed to delete a message.
A message doesn’t simply disappear like it was never sent – it is replaced with the text ‘‘this message was deleted’’ so you’ll have some explaining to do. Additionally, a recipient’s lock screen preview of a deleted message will not go away.
Don’t forget that some email services, most prominently Gmail, also have an ‘‘undo’’ function.
Available in Gmail settings (under general), this is a delayed sending mechanism. It gives you the opportunity to ‘‘Undo Send’’ for five, 10, 20, or 30 seconds after you’ve sent an embarrassing email you immediately regret – like bragging to your boss about the boat you’re on.
Once your summer is over, it might be a good idea to get the app Clear(iOS). This uses a unique algorithm to search through your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts and will clear up and delete problematic posts.
For example, all posts with swearing in them can be cleared at your discretion, as can posts that make generalised statements that can be construed as offensive – for example, if you’ve used the word ‘‘gay’’ in a post to express disappointment about the weather, or you’ve complained about Australian accents via a tweet.
Obviously, any of your friends and followers who have already seen these messages will not have your disrespectful words deleted from their minds.