What I Learned from Creating a High School Social Network
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medium.com
With that same knowledge I made another social network ~2/3 years later for an online community, and it worked better. Eventually I shut it down. In 2012 I revived it and very quickly learned the value of not mixing your business and presentation logic (refactoring the codebase to be maintainable was an absolute chore), and of preventing XSS and XSRF (someone set their avatar to the URL "/logout").
See also: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2016/Jan/55 [Full Disclosure: It essentially wins crypto vulnerability bingo! gilfether/phpcrypt]
If I was actually handed that info on a silver platter, willingly, then who knows.
But that's not your situation. In your situation, I'd be violating the trust of my entire school. That's neither a good idea ethically nor socially.
Now, if he'd implemented a mechanism to give users keys they could send him should they consent to him reading the log for moderation purposes, he would have been able to do the moderation job and not violate people's privacy. Or made structured data fields that users could consent to make public and also be used for data analysis purposes (like interests, societies, year, etc). But no. He just read their messages. He didn't even have a commercial incentive to analyse data, he just did it out of sheer voyeurism.
To make it clear: You advertised an anonymous service to a community you're a direct member of and didn't disclose your involvement in it. You not only willingly broke a moral code that you knew about, but you actually misrepresented the service in your advertisement and broke any trust you had with everyone who participated. That's a pretty serious wrong doing that warrants a little more self reflection and much more empathy towards the people you screwed over.
People running automated social networks, because there were none.
Great power comes cheaper and cheaper, no?
When I'm sitting in a bathroom stall I don't ponder the moral and ethical dilemmas of reading or not reading what someone scribbled on the wall. He was not running a cryptographically secure anonymous remailer service here. He was running a virtual bathroom wall to scribble gossip upon.
At any rate, an interesting article. It might have been interesting to set up something similar, just bundling an XMPP client and OTR, and having an XMPP-server per school/"cicrle" for pairing (could probably even require school logins for registering on sign-up -- just make sure to throw that information away (beyond possibly keeping age/gender tag).
With the caveat that secure, anonymous communication and "web browser" doesn't really mix -- it could probably be set up as web page/service too (Not sure if eg: Matrix has a web/js-client that does/tries to do client side OTR or equivalent?).
We had IRC, with chat-rooms per town -- as not everyone had Internet in the 90s in Norway. But that did afford some people pseudonymity.
* Privacy * Bullying * Under age pornography
Facebook, Instagram, Snapshat etc all struggle with this across their networks.
Something designed for a user base that is almost exclusively under 18.... Shudder.
College students have trouble conducting themselves online in a proper fashion - just look at Yik Yak and the headwinds it is facing.
The most valuable truths are the ones most people don't believe. They're like undervalued stocks. If you start with them, you'll have the whole field to yourself. So when you find an idea you know is good but most people disagree with, you should not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction.
As for porn, why does a social network have to allow embedded images? If it's mainly a chat service, there's no risk. I suppose someone could use your network as transport for links to outside content, but that's pretty unlikely and it's a stretch to say the network is responsible at all. You could also disallow hyperlinking.
Of course, both of those fixes make the system pretty damn hard to monetize, which I think is the biggest issue.
Although you seem to condemn college students, it seems as though your concerns are all solved by moving the target audience to colleges, because college students are "adult" enough that we don't care about these issues for them for the most part (with respect to laws).
> Facebook, Instagram, Snapshat etc all struggle with this across their networks.
Pretty sure they all started by being built on similar user bases, and it's a tremendously appealing audience to start an app with.
You'd be wrong.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/year-old-messaging-app-yik-yak-d...
Perhaps you meant you disagree that valuation makes sense?
"Hunter ID number (a number which I could validate but not easily trace to a particular person)"
I'd read that as some minimal formatting and the correct number of digits and you're in.
I suspect there were no small number of school admins, teachers, parents, ex students, middle/grade school students, outright adult pedos, etc.
More like 500 registered users out of a billion internet users.
Just saying.
Surprisingly high percentage, but I guess in such a relatively large group the negative effect of someone from that group having access to everything isn't as large as it would be in a smaller one. I don't think that would have working in my highschool, at least not without encryption and source code available...