Social networking brings people closer together, shrinks the world, and lets people share their lives with all their friends, and even total strangers. Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Instagram, et al have gotten almost everyone in on the “sharing” game.

But what if you don’t like people? Or what if, at least, you want to drop off the face of the earth every once in a while and be left alone?

Well, as it turns out, there’s an app for that too. And, ironically, it uses social networking to help you disappear.

The app is called Cloak. It is billed as the “antisocial app”, an “incognito mode for real life”. The idea is that you log in to the app using your FourSquare or Instagram login. You are then shown where all of your friends are. This allows you to avoid real-world contact with people that you’d just rather not see.

You can set up cloak with adjustable user settings to determine what kind of distance you want to keep from people, e.g. half a mile, etc.

What if, for example, you wanted to avoid co-workers on your day off? Or ex-girlfriends?

As one user commented:

“I love this app! I use it all the time to avoid my personal acquaintances. For example, if I want to get a bacon cheeseburger at Buddy’s Burgers but my ex-wife and kids are there. Now I know! Then I can just walk around the corner to Burger Bistro for their mushroom Swiss burger but then cloak would also warn me if my boss is there!” – WinCheck

Of course, there are some “unintended” uses for the app, another user points out:

“Perfect tool for stalking my friends. I mean seriously, it shows you the gps coordinates of your friends so that you can stalk them from the comfort of your own bath tub.” – vcPINK

Image via YouTube