We all have times when we just want to be alone—which means, because so far nobody has invented a polite way of saying “No, I want to see that movie/go get coffee/just chill by myself, stop texting me,” sometimes we have to lie to our friends. Or, you know, actively avoid them.
Programmer Brian Moore and former Buzzfeed creative director Chris Baker seem to have come up with a way to help us out: their new mobile app, Cloak, is the world’s first anti-social social networking app. By using location data from your actual social networks, Cloak helps you avoid those people that you really don’t want to run into.
The app currently pulls its data from Foursquare and Instagram, so you’ll have to follow the friends on those networks for the moment, though there are plans to integrate the other social media sites into the app. Cloak allows you to “flag” your friends from those sites, and will alert you when the people you flag get within a certain radius. At the moment, the default radius is half a mile, but it can be customized to be as large as two miles or as little as one block.
“I think we’ve seen the crest of the big social network … I think anti-social stuff is on the rise. You’ll be seeing more and more of these types of projects,” said Baker of his app during an email published by the Washington Post.
While I’m sure Baker and Moore have good intentions, I have concerns. Cloak essentially lets you track somebody’s location—which, yeah, you’re doing to avoid them, but it’s still kind of a breach of privacy. And for that matter, what’s to stop somebody from using Cloak to track you within its parameters? Just because it’s meant to be used for avoidance doesn’t that’s actually what people will use it for. People can be all kinds of nefarious.
I don’t know. I think for now I’ll stick with the tried and true method of being anti-social and avoiding your friends: lying. Why mess with the classics?
Source Mashable
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