Whispers, secrets and lies? Anonymity apps rise
AP › Barbara Ortutay
At a time when Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are pushing people to put forward their most polished, put-together selves, a new class of mobile applications aims for a bit more honesty.
Among the latest is Secret, created by two former Google engineers who were looking for a way to let people deliver genuine feedback to coworkers. With the app, friends and friends of friends can share their deepest and darkest thoughts, along with gossip, criticism and even plans to propose marriage, under a cloak of near-anonymity.
“This idea that you have to craft this perfect image online,” says Secret’s 30-year-old co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler. “That’s stressful. We want to remove that stress.”
Secret joins a handful of apps such as Confide, Whisper and Yik Yak that have become popular — and in some cases, notorious — in recent months, by offering users a way to communicate while cloaking their identities.
What happens when people are free to say what they want without a name and profile photo attached? It’s an experiment in human nature that harkens back to the early days of the Web, when faceless masses with made-up nicknames ruled chat rooms and online message boards.