Everyone has pictures on the Internet that are unflattering. Embarrassing. You know. You have too many accounts from too many photo-sharing websites to remember. You can't even remember your account names or passwords for some of them! This means that there are pictures of you, out there, forever, says Michael Backes, a professor at Saarland University, according to BBC News (link to article here). Backes led the development of X-Pire, software that "gives images an expiration date by tagging them with an encrypted key." Once they reach the expiration date, images can no longer be viewed or copied. And you no longer have to worry about those embarrassing pictures! In order to view pictures that are encrypted, users will have to have the X-pire browser add-on, currently only for Firefox. X-pire is subscription based.
The best solution to embarrassing/unflattering/horrifying images online is to not put them online. But, since that requires some forethought, X-pire does offer an interesting solution to this problem. Some people don't understand the implications (come on, we were all 20-year-old college students once!) of putting personal information freely available on the Internet. Although, when we were posting those pictures as 20-year-old college students, we probably wouldn't think to put an expiration date on them even it could be easily done by a software program.
Now, if only this could work for YouTube videos...
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