A new app for iPhone named Cloak will make it possible for users to track the location of family and friends and… avoid them.
Cloak allows users to gather the geographic location of their contacts via Foursquare and Instagram so you can give them the deuces. Cloak’s tagline is “Incognito mode for real life.”
“We feel like we’ve reached the point of social fatigue — too many networks with too much information, all the time,” creator Chris Baker says. “It’s OK to turn off and pick up a copy of ‘Walden’ and just be alone.”
The app lets people set up push alerts for acquaintances they’d prefer to avoid such as exes, frenemies or annoying co-workers. If someone wants to drop off the grid completely, they can set up these notifications for everyone in their social networks.
For now, the app only works with Foursquare and Instagram, so it has limited usefulness if your friends aren’t active on those networks. But the developers hope to add Facebook soon.
If this sounds familiar, the inspiration may have been borrowed by other social media apps experiments like Hell is Other People and the website Avoid Humans – a website specifically created to provide protection from the SXSW festival’s masses.
So I suppose the moral of the story is if you want to prevent any unwanted abuse of your location information, lock down your privacy settings and don’t share your whereabouts unless you’re comfortable with people knowing exactly where you are.
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