Cloak: The Antisocial-Media App : The New Yorker

Sign of the times

"[...] The app’s tagline is “Incognito mode for real life,” and it offers its users the ability to “avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat—anyone you’d rather not run into.” (Facebook’s newly announced Nearby Friends feature does essentially the same thing, though a spokesperson suggested that the app could be used “to make last-minute plans to meet up with a friend who happens to be in the same place you’re headed to.”) Cloak works by linking with your Instagram and Foursquare accounts to uncover the locations of these undesirables and revealing their avatars on a map, thereby empowering you to give them as wide a berth as possible; in this sense, it’s like a contemporary urban version of those maps from the Middle Ages, with their admonitory illustrations of dragons and sea monsters: “Here Be Vague Acquaintances.”"

Cloak: The Antisocial-Media App : The New Yorker