Is Your Facebook Profile As Socially Acceptable As You Think?

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If you’re applying for a job or school, you’re always warned that your Facebook profile can be your demise. You try to block all unwanted people who might be taking a sneak peek into your private life, delete unflattering photos and try to clean up any references to fun times that might not be favorably looked at by a future employer or program. However, as I discovered, there’s one thing we often forget to expunge from our devious past – the written posts.

Socio Clean is a free app that connects with your Facebook profile and looks at what you and everyone else has written on it. It does not block any content that would normally be blocked by your filters so the program – which has a Secure Trust Guard certificate and VeriSign Trusted – shows you all the bad things your profile has hidden.

The verdict after I ran the app on my profile? Not so good. My biggest violations were profanity and sexual references:

However, as I broke down my results, I started to notice some trends. First of all, the writings on my wall that were the most offensive didn’t come from me: It came from my friends writing on my wall. It’s important to remember that you might try to keep things polite, it’s often other people who are more lax with their postings. Think of all the things you post on other people’s walls and how they might be a bit more uncouth than what you would write for a status update. For example:

Also, a lot of the violations weren’t as bad as the app was making it out to be. Since when was writing xxx (which in Scotland was a standard way to end a text message) a bad thing?

Moral of this experience? While I did have some egregious social violations that I’m too embarrassed to post, if I expunged everything this program said was bad from my profile, I’d have almost no wall posts, picture comments and all the things that made a Facebook profile a great and easy way to connect with friends. My suggestions are that you try to keep conscious of what you write on your wall and others, and since you can’t control what other people do, make sure you have very strong filters in place to block people you don’t want prying.

More on TIME.com:

Google’s Search Results Get Social With Twitter, Flickr

Everloop: The Facebook for Tweens?

Facebook Adds Civil Unions To Its Relationship Status Options