Social media is a popular webspace where people can be able to share their personal ideas, comments, lamentations, messages, and other contents. On the other hand, anonymous social media apps like Whisper, YikYak, Secret and Facebook rooms are also gaining popularity right now. These applications meet the demand for identity privacy as it provides safe communication for the users without disclosing their real identities.
Given below are the things that a developer might need to know in order to develop an anonymous social networking application.
Considerations In Developing The Apps.
Users
In anonymous social networks, key pieces of information about your true identity are nonexistent. In some cases, personal profile is none at all. As a matter of fact, anonymous networks are divided into two categories the login and non-login apps:
- Login
Developers of the anonymous social networking apps are often asking users for their phone numbers as it is used to show the posts created by the user’s friends.
- Non-login
Whisper, for example, tracks their users by generating unique token or user id associated with their device. This indicates that if a user uses the anonymous app from another device, another token will be generated for him/her creating a new identity in the database.
Accounts
There are many approaches to switch a user from public account to anonymous account and vice versa in the anonymous app. But one of the best approaches is to assign a set of characters (similar to RPG games) to every user account. Each character is totally independent from each other. Thus, there is no way to access every other character’s data unless you know the username and password of the account owning the characters. This approach is also scalable as you can add many characters in a single account.
Chats
The approach for establishing anonymous chats is through the use of message encryption. As a matter of fact, numerous anonymous social networking apps prefer to use this feature. One way to encrypt private messages is through Anonyfish a third-party service that uses AES and BLOWFISH ciphers and it deletes the message after 45 days.
Contents and Interactions.
Anonymous social networking apps offer various feeds for their users. Examples of those are listed below:
- Nearby feed
Feeds are based on the location data of the user wherein users can only vote and comment on the posts within their community.
- Popular/ Explore Feed
Feeds are featured based on the largest number of likes, shares, replies or even upvotes within the whole network.
- Latest feed
This type of feed lists the posts that just got recently shared and this can possibly help you to fill the popular feed much earlier.
- Company feed
This requires users to register with the use of their company name.
- School feed
This feed requires developers to add search to allow the users choose the school where they can see feeds.
Fight Verbal Abuse.
There are ways to prevent verbal abuse in anonymous social networks see the list below:
- Flag post/ in-app warning
- Allow users to flag inappropriate posts and repetitive abusive posts can be subjected to an in-app warning.
- Remove Posts
- Hire individuals to detect and remove abusive posts and develop an algorithm to do the same task.
- Limit Users
- All contents are available to the public but only registered users can post.
- Geo-fencing
- Create a geographic boundary using GPS or RFID technology to prevent unwanted access.
Conclusion.
Developing an anonymous social networking app is a challenging yet exciting endeavor. Thus, knowing how to address the privacy needs of the users will bring your app to an enormous success. However, when developing anonymous social networking app, always bear in mind the welfare and safety of the users.
