Probably because Klout links to many other personal profiles other than just Twitter. And also, not sure how this invades your privacy, as much it just alerts you to the fact that all of this information is already on the internet. It’s not like they went digging through your purse to find your ID. That information was publicly available somewhere, and it was up to you to control that, in my opinion. Your questions about privacy in general seem worthy of attention, but your angle here seems a little like a red herring.

You know what`s really sad about this, Tonia (and briancarter alludes to it on his post at All Facebook)? That if Klout has its way, we’d all have to stop posting anything in public just to stop them from accessing our information and making themselves look more popular into the bargain.

That’s a pretty sad day for online life…

@Tere_Tere @MandersD22 What the what? How do you go about finding if your kids on there???

@tonia_ries interesting POV, it’s a fine line they have to tow, I’m not surprised that they are making some mistakes

@AnneWeiskopf Wow. Thank you for sharing. I’ll be sure to do the same!

I noticed this too, it suddenly showed all of my FB friends as people I influence, and suggested that I invite them to Klout. I felt really icky about it. Also these are people who are not socialMediaLites. They just use facebook like the average user and have no interest in Twitter and other platforms.

@dwaynekilbourne Klout all over my stream lately…wondering if all this bad press is actually good for them?

They also had a bug yesterday where they showed the JSON (computer format) representation of a logged in user, instead of a Web page. So when I logged in (‘cos they’d sent me some mail), I saw a profile format. Ugly but not particularly suprising to see that they have created ‘householdIncome’ and ‘race’ fields to describe me in their database.

https://twitter.com/#!/danbri/status/129584521740947456

@marthavalenta @RealtimeReport Even though @Klout’s own Privacy states “Over 18″… http://t.co/6S1JYb3A

#Privacy #Fail: @Klout Has Gone Too Far http://t.co/ErLhaTjT – via @tonia_ries (thx for discovering this BIG privacy issue) #klout #facebook

@BrentWees You are way too obsessed with Klout…..

Alternatief voor Klout? @Wwwijzer Net mail gestuurd om mijn Klout-profiel te verwijderen. Waarom? bit.ly/vcvJwC Hoe? bit.ly/uimkW5

@maryinhb Hm, that’s a complex issue. I don’t think you need to apologize for recommending the service though! People just need to be aware.

@Ed but this does sound pretty bad – leveraging a Facebook loophole, essentially.

@brianofshope Have you tried Stealth yet? A new search engine that lets you search the web anonymously… http://t.co/w4IK0yVX #privacy

@acatinatree thanks for the link though. Klout has made a profile for my teenage son. I am seriously unimpressed.

Tonia,

Following your invite on twitter I felt like sharing my opinion on this, too: I fully comprehend that you are upset about your son’s data going public, yet I fail to understand why you are blaming platforms like facebook or twitter for that leakage, let me explain why:

- you VOLUNTARILY gave away your “relationship” to your son on facebook
- you signed up for klout, authorizing them explicitly to scrape your data
- you posted something PUBLIC on facebook (certainly AFTER facebook walked you through their very nicely done tutorial when the new publisher was introduced delineating how YOU can make choices about what to share with whom)
- you disclosed the fact that your son was listed as one of your influencers on klout on your public blog (and then eventually all those other places the story appeared on…) because to klout your son is “just another profile” (and I bet they neither disclosed your relationship status to him as part of their influencer report nor did they post his age or anything else that was outside the public domain because that is not the business model klout had the last time I checked)
- none of the aforementioned companies (klout, facebook, twitter) violated their terms of services as far as I can see, all they did was scraping PUBLICLY available data
- of course everyone is reacting to your story and offering to “investigate”: it’s the US of A, who knows if you are unleashing an army of lawyers on them, so money is on the line but will that change something: I doubt it! (and this is not meant to be accusatory in any way, I am just deriving from my own impressions)

I think what we all need to understand quickly is that with social media EVERYBODY gets the ability to tell the world – and you should not complain if the world is listening: if you want your privacy protected you probably have to take this into your own hands rather than complaining about other companies that are “exploiting” your negligence. If you do want to complain that’s fine but at the same time we should stick with the facts:

YOUR (“the user” not “Tonia Ries”) decision or negligence to share something public means YOU ARE owning the consequences, too – it’s much like with the car industry: yes, they do make cars these days that go 150 MpH and it doesn’t take much effort to reach that speed other than putting your foot down, but if you loose control over your car and die, is it really the manufacturer that has to be blamed? Or should you have been aware of the fact that moving at this speed might bare a risk?

Privacy in the online world is dead – search engines and algorithms have gotten way too smart, the contextual intelligence of e.g. facebook is bordering on frightening (I personally still go with “amazing”) and google’s reach and computing power is out of this world, if there is something you want to protect “online” is the last place you might want to put it!

Or am I missing something? Looking forward to an interesting discussion! :)

Tonia, I’m really too lazy to split this into single posts using comments hence I’ll drop it all in once as a completely new comment, hope you don’t mind! (and sorry for the delay…) – so this is a reply to the series of comments ending with http://fyre.it/zza

First of all thank you for the kudos and the continuation of the discussion, I knew it would turn into something productive and who knows, if you really like it you might turn it into a blog post eventually (deswegen bleiben wir auch vorerst mal beim Englisch, oder? ;)

I’d love to take a look at every single point you brought up because I think they are all very relevant

1. Taking publicly available data and then “add a number to it based on some mysterious algorithm” sounds strangely familiar to me: what are S&P, Moody’s and Fitch doing again? See imho the internet isn’t anything else but a microcosm that mimics society: what ever is prevalent in the real world will eventually find application “in the cyberspace”, too and as ever so often that has two sides to it – yet it is a matter of fact and a neat little play on gamification, no one in his serious mind can, will or should take klout scores too serious (and if some weird agencies are doing that I bet Darwinism will take good care of them eventually…)

2. If you check the facebook API documentation you’ll see that klout probably isn’t even able to obtain DOBs for many people they are scraping data from: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/user/ states that you require a specific token to get the information – well, unless someone has made this information explicitly available by handing off one of the required tokens it won’t be visible. You can even try that for yourself here: https://graph.facebook.com/tonia.ries?fields=name,birthday – and you’ll see all you get is the information that is publicly available anyways because if it were that simple I bet klout would rather walk their own talk, then loosing clout by infringing their privacy policy.

That aside though I am a huge fan of fixing root cause much rather than fighting symptoms: kids bullying others isn’t a problem of klout (clout?) but of upbringing and education – mutual respect and courtesy go an amazingly long way yet they seem to have been forgotten in a society that prefers to elbow any kind of “obstacle” out of its way while blaming others, or we’ll abolish anything else that makes some bully others ;)

And Part 3

Now, we already discussed privacy and containment of information under #3 yet again: if you want things protected lock it up in your own webspace while taking appropriate precautions (directory protection, strong passwords, hardened software, injection-protected databases, …) or pay someone to take care of this for you. Maybe that is a niche you could make millions with? Or the reason Diaspora will be great, if they ever manage to launch? A truly secure social network where all your content is super-safe, no google crawling, not way-back caching, no leakage, no advertising (because you don’t have anything to offer to advertisers in the first place as you’re not profiling your members…) – the problem with that? Operating expense! Who’s paying for all of the upkeep and maintenance? The users? Hardly, not only because “free” is the thing on the internet and either awareness with the user is too low but because those that are aware have the skills required to help themselves in keeping things balanced – something your son might indeed help with solving one day, though to really solve this I guess one would need to study sociology and organizational psychology: the challenge is with the people and their values and beliefs not really in technology, that imho is just the means to an end ;)

Sorry for being somewhat lengthy and going off topic ever so often but I enjoyed it, so what do you think, where do we take this next? :)

oh, and I am totally serious about an e-book, but completely joking about title creds….lol

@Piers_Butler Yeah but they are working hard to sort that out and seem to be addressing those problems :) Interesting read tho!

Meh. This is what you get for sharing information about your son publicly.

I love when people get mad that they share public information thats GASP publicly available….

…sigh.