Social media man­agers who like a cloak-and-dag­ger sto­ry will like this one: an unnamed group of engi­neers has alert­ed TechCrunch jour­nal­ist Sarah Perez to a forth­com­ing web and mobile (iOS) plat­form that fus­es the anonymi­ty of apps like Whis­per and Secret with the ease-of-use fea­tures char­ac­ter­is­tic of pub­lic shar­ing plat­forms like Medi­um, Word­Press and Twit­ter.

Hush-hush

Perez had ini­tial­ly declined to report on the new plat­form because she had no idea whether these unnamed engi­neers had the know-how to build what they were claim­ing to have built. But they per­suad­ed her to keep their iden­ti­ties hush-hush for now after shar­ing their cre­den­tials: they’re a team of engi­neers who’ve worked in senior and con­sult­ing roles for large orga­ni­za­tions. As they’re nam­ing their new plat­form “Cloaq”, they want­ed to remain under a “cloak” until offi­cial launch as a mar­ket­ing ploy.

It’s a gam­ble; our mys­tery-lov­ing social media man­ag­er may like it but some may find such delib­er­ate coy­ness a lit­tle irri­tat­ing. Even so, it does tend to stir the curios­i­ty in spite of that.

Users can post con­tent anony­mous­ly with Cloaq and it’ll appear in the time­line of their fol­low­ers. But you don’t need to be a vet­er­an social media man­ag­er to rec­og­nize that, so far, it doesn’t sound any dif­fer­ent to oth­er anony­mous social apps like Secret.

Where true selves speak freely

This is where it starts to get more inter­est­ing: Cloaq, unlike the com­pe­ti­tion, will allow users to make posts of any length. And it lets you tag your posts with a cat­e­go­ry for search and sort­ing. The most rad­i­cal point of dif­fer­ence, how­ev­er, resides in Cloaq’s use of per­son­al user data: it doesn’t col­lect it. No email address­es or phone num­bers are need­ed at sign-up; users just enter a pass­word where­upon they’ll get assigned an @id number.

One of the unnamed engi­neer co-cre­ators puts it like this: “We designed this plat­form to give intel­li­gent peo­ple a way to speak their minds freely. We want to give peo­ple a way to real­ly be their true selves, and express their true beliefs, ideas, opin­ions and sug­ges­tions with­out the nat­ur­al reser­va­tion that comes with liv­ing in the pub­lic social media age, and wor­ry­ing about what their friends, fam­i­ly or fol­low­ers will think of them, or how they will be judged.”

Sounds intrigu­ing. Watch this space.