Klout — and influence measurement in general — has always been a controversial topic. How do you define influence? How do you measure it? Isn’t it context-specific? Much has been written and debated on this topic, and there is much more work to be done on this.
There’s another way in which Klout, specifically has been controversial. ”Everyone has Klout” says the Klout home page. What that means is that Klout will create a profile for you, whether you’ve opted in to be measured or not. Once they’ve created a profile for you, there is no way to opt out or deactivate your profile. Even if you don’t want to be measured, profiled, tracked or seen as endorsing their product.
So far, I’ve felt that this was a gray line. The way that Klout created most of its profiles was based on your Twitter account — and Twitter is, by its nature, a public platform. Open a Twitter account, and there are many tools and applications that will be able to access your account and all your posts and meta-data associated with them via the Twitter API. Still, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a company that sells its data to marketers, as Klout does, offer a way for people to opt out.
But now things have gone too far.
When I logged into my Klout page this morning, I was very surprised to see that Klout now lists my son as one of the people I influence. Anyone who is a parent of a young adult will know that nothing is more unlikely. And, knowing that my son is not on Twitter, and has always been very careful about managing his privacy on the Internet, how did Klout get the information to create a profile on my son???
This is where Facebook and its famously obtuse privacy settings comes into the picture. Facebook recently made a number of changes to its platform, one of which was to allow users to specify whether their posts were visible just to friends or public (or some combination). Whatever you used for your last post becomes the default for your next post. As a result, my Facebook posts are set to be visible to the public. And when my son recently commented on one of my Facebook posts, so was his comment–and Klout used that comment to find him and create a profile on him.
Search Google for his name + Facebook, and you won’t find his page. You won’t even find him via Facebook search, unless you have more personal information on him to narrow your search down. But now you can easily find him via a prominent link from the Klout profile of a relatively public person.
I’m not a legal expert, or a privacy expert, so I have no idea whether laws are being broken here. And yes, any decent headhunter could find his Facebook profile if they were looking for it.
But the idea that, just by virtue of the fact that he commented on my post, I am now exposing him, a link to his Facebook profile, and the information that Klout is pulling on his social graph — all in a far more public and visible manner than he would ever chose to agree to — is extremely disturbing to me.
Danny Brown has already posted on this topic on his blog. I really hope we hear from Klout on this issue. To date, the only recourse you have to protect not only your own privacy, but that of your family’s, according to Klout, is to not share any information publicly. If there were a way to de-activate my account until this was sorted out, I would.
Meanwhile, I have unlinked my Facebook account, and I suggest you do the same.
UPDATE: Brian Carter has added a post on this at AllFacebook.
UPDATE: I just heard from another social media professional that she has found a Klout profile for her son, who is 13 years old. In other words, Klout is creating profiles and assigning scores to minors.
UPDATE 10/28: Marian Heath, who manages family safety for Facebook, has advised that Facebook is investigating this issue.
UPDATE 10/29: Lisa Vaas has written a well-researched article on this issue for Naked Security.
UPDATE 10/31:
- Klout is no longer linking users created via a Facebook scrape to individual profile pages. However, the users still show up in the “influence networks” of their Facebook friends, and their scores are displayed on Klout and in applications and browser extensions that pull Klout scores.
- We’ve uncovered that some users now have duplicate Klout profiles with different Klout scores.
UPDATE 11/1: As of today, Klout allows users to delete their account.
UPDATE 11/8: Klout is no longer creating profiles and scores for unregistered Facebook users.
UPDATE 11/14:
- The New York Times has covered this story: “When Sites Drag the Unwitting Across the Web.”
- Klout CEO Joe Fernandez has responded to the debate on the Klout blog: “We Value Your Privacy.”
[...] Check out Tonia’s own take on the issue in this post at The Realtime Report. Tweet A Klout Upside the Head A Letter to Joe Fernandez [...]
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[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far? – Tonia [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far [...]
[...] Ries has just published an article titled: Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far, which outlines how Klout is indexing social networks and creating/measuring user profiles, even if [...]
[...] Friday morning, Tonia Ries was dismayed to find, upon logging into her Klout page, that Klout is now listing her son as a person whom she [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far? – Tonia [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far? – Tonia [...]
[...] The Realtime Report Share this:Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]
[...] (via Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far – therealtimereport.com) [...]
[...] Klout’s behaviours crossing the line relating to privacy and use of personal information as Tonia Ries recounted: [...] When I logged into my Klout page this morning, I was very surprised to see that Klout now [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far. Klout is creating profiles for people you're connected to on Facebook. People like your mother-in-law, and your kids. Here's the scoop. Source: therealtimereport.com [...]
[...] “Klout has gone too far“ [...]
[...] Last week, Klout began creating new user profiles and scores based on data pulled from Facebook. This means that, if you have your Facebook account linked to your Klout profile, you will start seeing your Facebook friends and family (including kids as young as 13) appear in your Klout influence network, with Klout scores assigned to them–something which has raised major privacy concerns. [...]
[...] news broke of their inclusion of minors and the way they were setting up profiles based on public interaction from otherwise private social [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far. | The Realtime Report- Klout adds private Facebook accounts without user’s consent or knowledge http://t.co/S1yPRqge #privacy #fail (via @ullemon) [...]
[...] of their new algorithm that tanked everyone’s scores, Tonia Ries discovered a real problem. A profile somehow got created for her son, even though his Facebook settings were private and he never opted-in to Klout. The working theory [...]
[...] of a young adult will know that nothing is more unlikely,” Ries wrote in an article for The Realtime Report. “Knowing that my son is not on Twitter, and has always been very careful about managing his [...]
[...] jeune adulte saura que rien n’est plus improbable “, Ries a écrit dans un article pour Le Rapport en temps réel . «Sachant que mon fils n’est pas sur Twitter, et a toujours été très prudent sur la [...]
[...] jeune adulte saura que rien n’est plus improbable “, Ries a écrit dans un article pour Le Rapport en temps réel . «Sachant que mon fils n’est pas sur Twitter, et a toujours été très prudent sur la [...]
[...] of a young adult will know that nothing is more unlikely,” Ries wrote in an article for The Realtime Report. “Knowing that my son is not on Twitter, and has always been very careful about managing his [...]
[...] Klout specifically has suffered quite the backlash on social channels. Recent alarms have sounded over privacy concerns and the inability to remove one’s self from Klout. (Though you can do that [...]
[...] jeune adulte saura que rien n’est plus improbable “, Ries a écrit dans un article pour Le Rapport en temps réel . «Sachant que mon fils n’est pas sur Twitter, et a toujours été très prudent sur la [...]
[...] in the cards even though it would be a best practice to try to accommodate especially when your under fire for privacy concerns.Who knows maybe the right person at Klout or Microsoft will stumble across this post and reach out [...]
[...] Then more fuel was added to the fire this week, regarding their privacy policy. (It’s time to name a law that every social media company will inevitably have a privacy scandal.) [...]
[...] two reasons, from a recent commenter calling himself Dylan_LW: I used Klout for two reasons but after the big “make-over” and migrating to the [...]
[...] The latest issue about privacy came up when a woman noticed that her teenage son had a Klout profile. [...]
[...] taken concrete steps to address another set of controversies. On October 27, I described how Klout had crossed a serious line in online privacy by creating unauthorized profiles for people in my Facebook social graph–including my [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far. – The Realtime Report [...]
[...] a marketing scheme for its perks programme? as I wondered – and on some of its practices in how it captures data and how it markets its perks to [...]
[...] is their scoring of people who have not signed up for the service and a massive issue reported by Tonia Ries who discovered that her underage child had a Klout score without signing up and there was no way to [...]
[...] Ries’s Klout score wеnt up sharply аftеr ѕhе wrote a blog post аbουt hеr experience аnԁ posted a link tο іt οn Twitter. [...]
[...] human beings has a long history, and while Klout, Peerindex and Kred are wonderfully new and shiny (although increasingly less shiny in the case of Klout), they are the second cousins, once removed, of psychometrics – the scientific art of [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far. Oct 27, 2011 [...]
[...] expose profiles meant to be private. This was brought to light by marketing blogger Tonia Ries, who saw her son's picture come up when she logged in to Klout. Her son had taken pains to make his Facebook profile private; but [...]
[...] had never registered with Klout. The story broke when Ries published her discovery on her blog, The Real Time Report. In her article, Ries also cited that this Klout privacy invasion wasn’t a new issue; in fact [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far – Tonia Ries [...]
[...] to Tonia Ries with The Realtime Report, Klout created a profile for her son based on information it collected from her Facebook. The [...]
[...] Klout profile. Many smart people have covered the privacy topic more throughly than I can because their own children have Klout profiles. That’s right, minors with private accounts have Klout profiles which [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far. Klout is creating profiles for people you're connected to on Facebook. People like your mother-in-law, and your kids. Here's the scoop. Source: therealtimereport.com [...]
[...] Klout specifically has suffered quite the backlash on social channels. Recent alarms have sounded over privacy concerns and the inability to remove one’s self from Klout. (Though you can do that [...]
[...] Media and Privacy: Today’s generation is growing up confronted by an unprecedented lack of privacy. I’ve talked to many young (and not-so-young) people who feel overwhelmed by the constant [...]
[...] Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far. [...]
[...] are a number of privacy concerns being talked about as well, including concerns about the volume of data that sites like Klout have on people that have never even subscribed to or even heard about the…. That is of course a big issue but not the point of this [...]
Who has the most KLOUT Achievements so far?…
I think I had 43 or 47, something with a 4 at the beginning ;) However I couldn’t see the point of it and it had the distinct look of spam about it (an opinion I’ve seen crop up on Twitter and in blogs). It appears to have addressed the worst of the …
[...] care about my Klout score. It’s a fairly arbitrary number, subject to change, prone to privacy snafus. Like most social platforms & tools these [...]
[...] importantly, however: why is Klout targeting teens–barely 6 months after a major privacy fail based on Klout creating profiles for minors raised a furor, including coverage in The New York [...]
[...] I have learned first-hand, Facebook privacy permission settings are a tricky thing. Klout had to change the way it managed data from Facebook accounts shortly after it added the [...]