Sssh... I have a Secret

The latest social media app to go viral is Secret, an anonymous Twitter-like space where users can post any thought or secret they like, without having to own up to it.

You can share what you are thinking and feeling with friends, free of judgement. There are no names and no profiles.

It’s a space to openly share what you are thinking or feeling, to “speak freely”, according to Secret.

The app was created by former Google and Square employees David Byttow and Chrys Bader, with the idea that people could 100% be themselves without fear of rejection, judgement or online piss taking.

There are quite a few features on the app besides posting secrets. You can comment on your friends’ secrets with a new and unique avatar for each conversation, so you can keep track of those conversations while still staying anonymous.

When you post your own secrets, you can add a photo or colour backdrop. Customise further with blur, textures, and moods.

You can see how it gets pretty addictive. You can scroll through all the boring secrets and the secrets that other people are interesting but really they are not, until you get the juicy ones that really deserve to be known.

There are confessions from all kinds of people living all kinds of lives, so the secrets are diverse and original. You could probably spend hours reading the secret lives of others.

You do have to ask, though. How anonymous is anonymous? I mean it is the internet. It’s one thing to have thinly veiled secrets that anyone who knows you can decipher, but surely it wouldn’t be too difficult for those really smart internets people to figure out who is posting what.

The app’s own privacy page states that it collects users’ log, location and device information, but it is solely used for debugging and analytical purposes.

So, it’s really not so anonymous, is it?