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This weekend I deleted my Klout Accounts 1) Business and 2) Personal.
I know this post looks like another one of those posts where the person is mad about the recent changes to Klout and how it adversely affected their ranking. This post is not about that whatsoever.
This account is about safety! I think people need to be more careful with the way they throw their log-in information around with respect to logging onto different sites.
Did you see the article in the New York Times, November 13, 2011 – “When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web” The article talks about a mother who checked her Klout Profile and saw that the people she influences were her two children, daughter 15 and a son 13. Here kids were automatically assigned a Klout score. Now, Klout says it has discontinued this process, but I know I used to see influencers who came up with scores and pop-up invitation requests for me to invite my friends.
Maybe, some of the facts have changed in this story. The point, here is that information from sites like Facebook, should be kept private to those closest to us. Even our best efforts for protecting our id’s may not be enough, especially if we share those authorized log-ins with other applications. Maybe, we should be thinking twice about it.
Here is the message you get from Klout after you have deleted your account.
“Thanks, you have successfully opted out of Klout. You will be removed from Klout.com within 24-48 hours. You will be removed from our API within 7 days. If you decide to opt back into Klout you will have to sign up again and it will take at least 90 days for us to accurately measure your influence. For the quickest removal from our systems you can choose to deauthorize the Klout app from your social accounts by going into the relevant network’s settings page.”
It makes it sound like there will be great pains if you are going to delete your account and try to reestablish it in the future. Remember, Klout will be sold by its owners in the not too distant future and the way they can show value is by having enough people’s permission to store their personal data. Klout does not want people to leave their platform or the value of their data will go down.
The choice is up to you, but I think articles like the one referenced in this post should serve as a wake-up call to be a little more catious about the data that is being shared with other networks.
What are your thoughts on this issue? Is it a topic we should be concerned about or not. From my point, the Klout “Value” Platform does not offer me enough return to compromise my personal data. What are your thoughts?
Picture Christine Rondeau
