Cloaq a communication app for hackers

Cloaq - a communication app for hackers?

A mysterious team of developers is working on a new anonymous social network that will make it impossible for anyone to determine your identity, reports TechCrunch. Think of Cloaq as a cross between Twitter and anonymous social networks like Whisper and Secret.

Cloaq will let you post messages of any length and keeps users anonymous by assigning a computer-generated ID number. You'll have the option to post without an ID number, further blurring your identity. Its co-founders won't even reveal their identities.

The app doesn't require any personal information to sign up, and its co-founder told TechCrunch that even if there is a hack, there will be no way for the hackers to tell who's posting what.

Cloaq is the latest in a string of apps designed to let you share anonymously. There are private messaging apps like Wickr and Confide. There are also networks that let you broadcast to a community like Secret and Whisper.

Cloaq will launch on iPhone in a few weeks.

How It Works

Like anonymous “social” apps, Cloaq will allow users to post content, which appears in the timeline of those following you. This isn’t entirely different, on its own, from something like Secret, but there are a number of other features that make Cloaq sound unique.

For starters, the anonymous posts can be of any length, and can be tagged with a category for searching and sorting. Of course, you can be pseudo-anonymous on blogging platforms today, especially on Tumblr, which is already home to a number of “anonymous” personalities, including some of those in the tech industry would know, like Startup L. Jackson or that angry Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley guy (gal?).

However, what Cloaq says would be different on its platform is that it won’t even collect users’ email addresses or phone numbers at signup, like Secret or Tumblr or Twitter or anyone else these days, would do.

“So, even if there is a hack… there is no personal information to retrieve,” explains a Cloaq co-founder. “That’s my only beef with Secret. It’s really fun to use and consume micro-content on, but I still wont post anything that I wouldn’t want coming back to me, because they have my personal information.”

Instead, with Cloaq, you simply enter a password and get assigned an @id number, which serves as your handle of sorts. And if you want to publish something that’s totally cloaked, you can choose to not even have your @id number associated with it. It will still show up in the streams of those who follow you, though.

These numbers will start at @alpha1 and go through @alpha9999 before moving on to @beta1 through @beta9999, and so on. The co-founder adds that while Cloaq can handle password resets via security questions, those who forget their Cloaq ID could be out of luck, which is why they’ve tried to simplify them.

Like blog posts, Cloaq posts can have a title, photo and content, though the title and photo are optional, which lets Cloaq work for long-form and short-form content alike. There will also be standard features, like a Popular section, favoriting and flagging functions, and comments among other things. To cut down on abuse, Cloaq will have a no-tolerance policy for racism, prejudice hate speech, and threats. Users’ accounts making those sorts of posts will be immediately frozen.

Source: Business Insider

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