By Claire Ayles
The world of social media turned full circle this week with the launch of an app that lets you hide from – rather than interact with – your mates and colleagues. The developers of this new ‘Cloak’ app told the BBC it allows you to "avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat - anyone you'd rather not run into" by giving you real-time information about which of your social media contacts are close to your current location.
With Facebook now in its second decade, we’ve had a whole ten years of people spilling the beans online about every single little thing they do or think, so it’s perhaps no surprise that we’re beginning to see a wave of innovation designed to improve rather than jeopardise our privacy. But surely Cloak is flawed.
To start off with, it takes information from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, etc. to work out which people are close by. So if you want to give that annoying bloke or girl a wide berth, you first need to be their online ‘friend’. Talk about sending out mixed signals!
Indeed, it seems to me that Cloak’s nifty little map will help the stalker just as much as the person being stalked. After all, if you know someone’s location, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to find them.
Who knows if or how people will use this app, but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of similar innovations spring up over the coming months. The cynic in me says they’re not really being developed in order to protect your privacy, but to make their inventors rich beyond their wildest dreams. And with Facebook parting with an eye-watering £11.4bn to get its hands on private-messaging service WhatsApp (Jamaica’s worth less than that), who can blame people for jumping on the privacy bandwagon?
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