

Privacy Fail: Klout Has Gone Too Far - pier0
http://therealtimereport.com/2011/10/27/privacy-fail-klout-has-gone-too-far/

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sp332
This is the result of open data, or the semantic web, or whatever you want to
call it. Anyone can look at your public info on the web, do some simple math,
and get this same info. Facebook encourages this through their "social graph"
APIs, and twitter has been used this way by researchers for years. So if
anyone wants to do this to you, they can. Are you going to opt-out of every
service that wants to look at your twitter account?

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rvschuilenburg
I was thinking the same. What is is that klout does here, that is wrong? If
the post is public on Facebook, what can you do about it?

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dfxm12
What the author says is wrong is the fact that you can't opt-out of this
service, and that it is too difficult to determine what is and isn't publicly
available on social networking sites.

The author has a point, but he's just going in the wrong direction (and should
be focusing more on twitter and Facebook and less on Klout). He should be
arguing in favor of more transparent privacy options, opt-in instead of opt-
out by default, and more secure defaults in social networking rather than
saying someone is doing something wrong with publicly available info.

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jamesbritt
_The author has a point, but he's just going in the wrong direction (and
should be focusing more on twitter and Facebook and less on Klout)._

He should be holding up Klout and saying, "See, this is what's wrong with
Facebook."

But this seems to be a hard message to convey. People want to like and use
Facebook, and would rather blame a site like Klout than face the truth about
what liking and using Facebook actually means.

To me it's like walking down the street naked and then complaining about how
cameras work because people are able to take pictures.

Facebook + time = sadness.

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wccrawford
This is obviously wrong, and I'm surprised Klout thought it was okay.

"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."

And that is probably illegal in many countries. I expect lawsuits.

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sp332
I'm pretty sure it's part of the ToS you agree to when you sign up to FB or
Twitter. Since minors can't use those services without parental permission
anyway (because they can't agree to the ToS by themselves), I think the
parents ought to be aware that they are giving FB & Twitter permission to do
this.

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gldalmaso
The world seems to be turning into a messed up place where we willfully trade
off our privacy for sociability.

Should we just accept that it is ok for corporations to trade our info willy-
nilly while all we want to do is be social on the web?

How long and how far will this go on? Until every other bit of our digital
life is tracked, profiled and sold?

When did we stop being consumers and became products? Will there ever be a B2B
transaction with our faces next to a barcode?

I think we need to get a grip before we start finding this all too normal.

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yummyfajitas
I've found a solution to the problem of people finding information I want to
keep private. It's actually fairly simple.

Stuff I want to make public goes here: <https://github.com/stucchio>
<http://crazybear.posterous.com/>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas>

If I had a twitter/facebook/etc, it would fall into this category.

Stuff I want to keep private goes here: file:///home/stucchio/

The general rule of thumb (ignoring exceptions like gmail): "http" = public, [
"file", "ssh"] = private.

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phaylon
Well, you can connect to webspace via SSH. Which reminded me of a phenomenon I
almost forgot: Back before facebook, I can remember multiple situations where
people made the mistake to think that things on their public webspace are
private just because they weren't linked.

