‘Tiger Text’ is gaining public noteriety as just the thing for cheaters like Tiger Woods, who was brought down in part by a trail of undeleted text/SMS messages. (You might have thought having over a dozen mistresses may have had something to do with it.)
From Time Magazine:
…it allows users to set a time limit for a sent text to hang around after it has been read. When that life span has been exceeded, the message will disappear, say the developers, from the recipient’s phone, the sender’s phone and any servers. The message cannot be forwarded anywhere, stored anywhere or sold to any tabloid for an undisclosed sum. (See a brief history of the Tiger Woods scandal.)
It works like this: when, say, a prominent politician sends his mistress an iPhone message via TigerText, the mistress will be prompted to install the app. When she has done so, she can read the message, but she can’t keep it. In fact, the message is never actually sent to her phone; it’s stored on TigerText’s servers. After the politician’s specified time span has elapsed — anywhere from one minute to five days — the message ceases to exist. There’s even a “delete on read” setting, which counts down from 60 after a message is opened and erases its text at zero.
‘Tiger Text’ doesn’t seem to be available in the Australian app store, (yet). But just in case you think its an urban myth, here’s the US iTunes page. (Hmm… maybe when they do release it here they’ll rename it: ‘Come In Spinner’.)
Don’t think the outcry over the Wood’s scandal and other situations like the Fevola/Bingle media war is evidence of a growing return to morality. Human hearts want to do the wrong thing, or at the very least, they don’t want accountability and scrutiny. In such an economy, the answer to fallen behaviour is not to stop, it’s to find a way not to get caught.
No amount of condemnation or scrutiny will change a heart, it will only reveal what’s already there.
The only thing that can change a heart so that it will not want or have need for software like ‘Tiger Text’ is the Gospel.
HT: Gospel Driven Church.
Also, here’s another Time article on further online developments that make cheating easier. Cheating 2.0: New Mobile Apps Make Adultery Easier.
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