Interviewing for a job, but wondering if your prospective employer will turn up embarrassing college photos of you on Facebook? A team of University of Washington computer scientists think they've come up with the answer. The team has developed a prototype service that makes electronic communications "automatically self-destruct" after a set period of time. The service, "Vanish," was released today as a free, open-source tool that works with the Firefox browser.

Here's UW describes the technology:

The Vanish prototype washes away data using the natural turnover, called "churn," on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key, which it never reveals to the user, and then encrypts the message with that key. It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks, the same ones often used to share music or movie files. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.

The UW says Vanish provides a better option that simple deletion (given that many web services archive data indefinitely) and encryption (which can be overturned by legal action). The tool can be applied to things like e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages, making them "irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers."

"In today's world, private information is scattered all over the Internet, and we can't control the lifetime of that data," said UW computer science professor Hank Levy in a statement, adding that "as we transition to a future based on cloud computing, where enormous, anonymous datacenters run the vast majority of our applications and store nearly all of our data, we will lose even more control."

Along with Levy, the team behind Vanish includes UW doctoral student Roxana Geambasu, assistant professor Tadayoshi Kohno, and undergraduate student Amit Levy, all from the UW computer science department. Here's their paper on their project, as well as a how-to video below:

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