An article in The Daily Beast focuses on a nifty little app for your smartphone called Cloak. "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.'"

Cloak links to 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." If none of those creeps are around Cloak flashes this message: "All Clear: There's nobody nearby."

Author Mark O'Connell concludes that Cloak "works," but that might not be a good thing. He writes, "'All Clear: There's nobody nearby' reads like such a strange, sad message, such a lonely thing to have achieved through technological control of our social environments. Looking at that screen makes me want to place my phone face down on my desk, go out into the street, and walk around until I bump into someone I know."