

Opt Out of Klout Now - johnjlocke
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/06/opt-out-of-klout-now/

======
Deestan
No, I am not going to opt out.

1\. A system in which I personally have to contact every scammer that had the
same idea is not a system I wish to accept and play along with.

2\. By going to their site and authenticating, I have proven to them that I am
a) an active user and b) there is a chance they may hold some power over me by
collecting my data. While they may make a "promise" not to store my data, they
can toss the list of opt-out users over the wall to another "entirely
different" company which _also_ collects my data and now sees fit to
prioritize me. I don't know about this other company, so I can't opt out. See
1.

3\. As nochuck13 said: Their Facebook opt-out auth demands access to your
friends list.

~~~
verticalpalette
I've already replied to nochuck13's comment, but I'll add it here as well.

For #3, access to your public profile AND friend list really is the minimum
level of access you can ask from the Facebook API. See
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/login/public-...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/login/public-
profile-and-friend-list/).

~~~
dspillett
The fact that the facebook API is broken in that manner does not make giving
them that permission something I want to do.

------
Jabbles
[http://imgur.com/vn27Bf6](http://imgur.com/vn27Bf6)

This does sound like a bait-and-switch from Klout, but I don't understand the
appeal of networking for networking's sake.

~~~
edent
Heh! You got me :-)

But, in seriousness, with those buttons you can see the reach of that post on
each social network. It would be fairly trivial for you to verify those
numbers are correct and to come to your own conclusions about whether my blog
has "influence".

I'm not against badges per se - but I don't like an obfuscated way of
calculating something.

~~~
Jabbles
Given that I know very little about Krout, perhaps you could explain why you
participated in the first place. I don't wish to sound rude; I'm genuinely
interested in what exactly you did, and why you thought it was worth doing.

Basically, can you expand on: " _A vaguely plausible "score" that you can use
to justify your "investment" in tweeting all day long._"

Thanks

~~~
edent
I didn't participate. Klout hoover up public information. Are you on Twitter
or Facebook? Congratulations! You are a Klout user by default!

They have a score for you which they can then sell on.

Sme with Kred. You don't sign up - they just assume passive consent.

~~~
ldng
How come ?! This is blatantly illegal in Europe ! I genuinely really don't see
how they could get passive consent unless FB and Twitter themselves give them
access. Or they just scrap public profiles ?

~~~
uxwtf
Why is it illegal in Europe? Klout analyses your Twitter interactions which
are publicly visible.

~~~
ldng
In Europe you it's opt-in by default. You have to explicitly consent to the
creation of an account as far as I understand it. So, to me, they could scrap
content but not go as far as create automatically an account without your
consent. Or I misunderstood something and would be glad someone explains it to
me.

~~~
talkingquickly
I don't think they create an account for you, they just compute a score based
on your activity on social media accounts you already have.

So if you have a twitter account, they can generate a score for the twitter
user using publicly available information and then if you sign up to klout,
link these existing calculations to the newly created account.

------
nohuck13
Klout: "To opt out of Klout, please verify the you are the owner ... Note that
we request only the bare minimum information provided by Twitter or Facebook
for authentication."

Facebook: "Klout Opt-Out would like to access your public profile __and friend
list. __"

I've never done Facebook OAuth. This isn't really the bare minimum is it?

~~~
verticalpalette
It is. From
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/login/public-...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/login/public-
profile-and-friend-list/): "When a user logs into your app and you request no
additional permissions, the app will have access to only the user's public
profile and friend list."

~~~
esolyt
Yes. Also, they're not legally allowed to store or make a copy of your friend
list.

------
lmm
Better option: don't get a job that involves raising your social media
"influence", unless you want that to be your job?

A manager could equally well bring up your number of twitter followers (that's
publicly viewable, right?) in a performance review.

~~~
jonnathanson
The day Klout scores start being taken into serious consideration in
performance evals is the day people start gaming Klout hardcore, and
consequently, the day Klout scores cease to have any value whatsoever.

Case in point: some recruiters _are_ starting to take Twitter follower counts
into consideration. That trend, coupled with all the perverse incentives
associated with having a putatively massive Twitter following, have led to the
gaming of Twitter, the purchase of zombie followings, the proliferation of bot
farms, and so forth.

We'd better believe the same thing will happen with Klout if it ever becomes
even mildly important in professional life.

------
hkmurakami
Happy to say that for once, I had done what I knew in my heart was right and
opted out of klout sometime last year. Never got a confirmation msg but I just
double checked and my profile is unavailable on Klout [1].

Also checked and saw that they didn't start constructing another page of me
using my FB address, so I think I'm Klout-free so far. What makes it hard is
that these bartards make profiles without your consent. I honestly wonder if
there's anything that legally prevents them from making another ID of me
through tumblr of facebook url identifiers.

[1] [http://klout.com/hkmurakami](http://klout.com/hkmurakami)

~~~
gtufano
I opted out some months ago, now I checked back the page related to my twitter
account and it's present. I tried to sign in to check what happened and was
greeted with a "You already opted out from this account, do you want to opt
back in and reinstate the account"? It seems that, at least in my case, the
page is apparently permanent.

------
bobsy
I have never cared out Klout. The day my employer cares about it is the day I
move on to bigger and better things.

Regarding the guys website. When did it become a thing to make all content
bold? I have been seeing this more and more. It's horrible. Recently The
Guardian mobile website started using a bold font and I haven't used it
since..

~~~
edent
The font on my site shouldn't be bold (apart from the title). Mind if I ask
which browser you're using?

~~~
guycook
It's quite heavy for me (too much for my liking as well) - Chrome 27 on OSX.
The culprit is [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/?custom-
css=1&csblog=1&cscache=6&csr...](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/?custom-
css=1&csblog=1&cscache=6&csrev=34) giving a font-weight of 500. Probably
affecting OSX people only

~~~
bobsy
The 500 weight makes the font look bold in both Firefox and Chrome. Both
Latest. Windows 8.

[http://imgur.com/YPHkdno](http://imgur.com/YPHkdno)

~~~
edent
Thanks both. Fine in Linux - but will make some changes for those on lesser
OSes :-)

~~~
mh-
Linux-on-the-desktop superiority complexes are usually annoying- but this one
is especially amusing to me, since you're replying to a thread about
discovering a major deficiency in your font rendering.

~~~
edent
We all have our blind spots :-)

~~~
mh-
indeed. I've dealt with, what feels like, every possible font rendering issue
on linux. something of a pet peeve of mine. :)

that said: if you have a screenshot of your browser w/ the font showing and
what desktop env+browser you're in, I can probably tell you what's wrong.

------
beaker52
We have been employed by how well we market ourselves for at least two
generations now.

It's no longer about our skill in our work, but by how well we market
ourselves. You can see this when you see people doing jobs they are
unqualified for, or just plain bad at.

Social networks, including Twitter double as self marketing tools. Klout
exposes this clearly. For some, under the guise of "keeping up with friends"
or "keeping abreast of technology", it's a clambering to the top of the ladder
of the "self-marketeers"; either socially, or in industry.

I beg people to consider, is that really the pinacle of human existence?

~~~
danso
At what point in history do you think success in human society was based on
skill in work and not on "who you know"?

Edit: by the narrow standard of skill, Steve Jobs would qualify for someone
who made it early on through hustle and his affiliation with Woz. You can
argue that hustle and ambition is a skill...and those who are considered high-
influencers might argue that they, too, are ambitious hustlers.

~~~
beaker52
Knowing "a good plumber" is no longer knowing a genuinely skilled plumber.
It's knowing a person you have an affection towards, one that has been
marketed well to you.

Perhaps I am naïve but I believe that in the past people were more discerning
about the true skill of an individual and less clouded by the appeal of the
individual.

~~~
beaker52
You have reduced the discussion to what, subjectively, makes a good plumber.

I will try to bring this back to my original point - One that is not
necessarily a good marketeer may be far more suitable for the job, yet good
marketeers but unskilled plumbers (to say unsuitable for the skilled job at
hand) seem to be "successful" in terms of success and profit in their field.

~~~
danso
So how are you quantifying this? The metric that you've set up: skill level
vs. popularity/success, is not easy to measure. Because for the most part, the
examples that will easily come to mind of good and bad people will also be the
popular ones...

So when you go into this with the expectation that success/popularity _should_
be directly related to skill, you are going to naturally remember the many
examples of when bad people somehow have success. And so you conclude: success
is not correlated enough to popularity, or else Person XYZ would not be
famous/rich.

But let's say I, on the other hand, think there's a strong correlation between
success and skill...and I can think of lots of successful people who also
happen to be skillful...but I suffer from the same confirmation bias as you
do.

So who's right here? I don't know, but I'm just pointing out that your
assertion may not fit the actual facts (if we could ever quantify it).

~~~
beaker52
My bias is towards there being a lack of connection between ones marketability
and their skill based on my biased and limited observing of people performing
roles they are believed (by people who put them there) to be better at than it
is revealed that they are.

I have also observed people keeping these roles through the relationships they
manage with the people they are accountable to. Relationships in these
circumstances are about marketing one individual to another.

I'd be surprised if these observations are limited to my own experience.
Somewhere in amongst all the biases of our individual experiences we must
determine something to be fact. For if I read and agree with a scientific
paper which outlines something I regard as fact, it is still subject to my
experience and hence we must ground ourselves on the basis of our collective
experiences aligning.

------
buro9
I hadn't even realised that they had a profile on me even though I've never
participated in their site.

I've now opted out, but I suspect doing so has fattened the profiles of
everyone I follow as verifying Twitter id to opt-out meant granting access to
who I follow for a brief moment.

~~~
ldng
How do you check without login in ?

~~~
paulgb
klout.com/<your twitter username>

------
vermontdevil
The de facto opt-in without realizing is wrong. What if a future employer sees
you have a high klout score and thinks you waste time on twitter etc? When in
fact you only use it for keeping up with trends in tech world like web dev or
python. It's nuts to be assigned a number without knowing how its generated.

Also great use of the word frippery. Never saw that one before.

~~~
p_apps
Seconded. I used the word 'frippery' in my opt-out comment. I only remember
seeing this word in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books.

------
rjd
I just had a quick look onto it myself and can official say its a complete
joke of a ranking system.

Apparently some of my friends from the news industry (where I used to work),
being minor local celebs/TV personalities... with thousands of follows they
interact with daily... friends with proper international celebs... are scoring
lower than some of my friends that just rant bullocks.

I wouldn't bother about this service being very indicative of anything in the
real world.

------
decklin
Unlike most people, I have a protected Twitter account (my tweets are not
public). In order to "opt out", I have to authorize their app to be able to
read all my tweets! Insane.

I guess I'll just continue to hope they're not building a "shadow profile" on
me based on my friends' public tweets (and pretending said profile doesn't
exist... I don't _appear_ to have one, anyway).

------
catmanjan
The idea of a web site keeping a profile on me based on a conglomeration of my
other profiles makes me think of it as an "open source" PRISM...

~~~
jcbrand
What exactly is "open source" about it?

~~~
catmanjan
From a software sense nothing, hence the quotation marks, but as someone else
described, open source means something different when talking about
intelligence gathering.

------
zlatanmenkovic
As a founder of a company in that same space I would like to add some nuance
to this blog. Putting it as simple as scoring people and helping you sell back
the data so you can improve your score is to simple.

Scoring, ranking and sorting people is important for the future of the web.
It's comparable to Google's pagerank. You need some sort of
analyses/score/rank to value the content shared by someone. But with pagerank
nobody complaint because the value was directly visible in the Google search
results and it was just a website not a person that got a score. Know we're in
the social age and it's not site's that are the publishers but people. And
Klout is not the only one that's doing this, we are doing it, Google's doing
with the G+ authorrank and Facebook probably has it as well in their edge
rank.

The thing with Klout is that it's the only one that puts focusing on the
person himself and touching your ego which can upset some people.

The applications and possibilities of the data are rarely thought of.

~~~
threedaymonk
> Scoring, ranking and sorting people is important for the future of the web.
> [...] You need some sort of analyses/score/rank to value the content shared
> by someone.

This strikes me as some kind of variant of the _ad hominem_ fallacy. You don't
need to know anything about the author to value their content. A piece could
be anonymous or the author's sole work and still be worth reading; conversely,
people with high internet reputations often write garbage.

Edit: I meant _appeal to authority_ , not _ad hominem_. Insufficient coffee
error.

~~~
jasonlotito
You're new to HN, so I'll let you in on something: while sometimes the message
is more important than the messenger, many times it's not. Who says something
is just as important. If that we're not the case, HN would remove the
usernames as well.

There is a reason people provide context for what they say by sharing their
experience. And just like in real life, taking legal advice from IANAL isn't
something you should blindly do.

~~~
threedaymonk
> If that we're not the case, HN would remove the usernames as well.

That doesn't follow. And, funnily enough, HN _does_ deemphasise the author by
showing the name in small grey text. There are plenty of reasons to attribute
posts: the conventional expectation that one can be identified as the author
of one's work, for one; the tendency of people to be more civil, for another.

> You're new to HN, so I'll let you in on something

Come on, I know I've only been here for nearly four years, but there's no need
to be quite so patronising.

~~~
jasonlotito
> Come on, I know I've only been here for nearly four years, but there's no
> need to be quite so patronising.

I wasn't being patronising. I was trying to make a point (though, I'll admit,
it wasn't obvious). I admit that attempt was clumsy. Sorry for making you feel
like you were being patronized. My intent was 100% honest though.

I was trying to show what could happen if association was removed. If context
was removed. If I don't know who you are, how can I quantify your advice.
After all, I'm much more inclined to appreciate people's opinions on the state
of HN year over year if they've been participating longer than that.

> the conventional expectation that one can be identified as the author of
> one's work, for one; the tendency of people to be more civil, for another.

And context. Advice is cheap. Everyone can offer advice. And context helps us
rate that advice. Just because something sounds good doesn't mean it should be
followed, or even listened to.

And it's fairly easy to make a mistake in authoring what you say to the point
that people misunderstand you, even if it's not what you meant.

------
miguelrochefort
What's up with all the drama? These arguments hold true for any service out
there. Nowadays, it's almost like everyone is actively trying to find reasons
to hate everything. How is that productive?

Nothing stops you from sharing rumors without creating a big movement around
them. Being part of a boycott doesn't make you more important.

~~~
jlgaddis
For me, it was because it wasn't an "opt-in" service. They _will_ create a
profile for you and advertise your "klout" whether you ask them to or not.

That's what angered me about it, anyway. I opted out a looong time ago and
encourage everyone else to as well.

------
gexla
First thought - I would never take a job where I have performance reviews,
especially those which account for my Klout score.

Second thought - The activity that goes into my Klout score brings in a lot of
work (networking!)

These seem contradictory. I guess in some ways, my Klout score is my own
personal performance review. ;)

------
thegna
A related question to HN community:

Is there anyway to opt out of Wikipedia? Say, somebody created a profile page
for me without asking for my permission. Is there anyway to delete my page?

~~~
ErsatzVerkehr
In general, anyone can edit or delete Wikipedia pages.

If you are a "notable person" then you can expect your edits to be reverted,
however; on the other hand, if you are not very notable, a page about you
would probably not survive very long anyway.

~~~
thegna
My original question was: let's say I'm a well-known person in my field,
somebody created a Wikipedia profile page for me, and the page has been there
for years. Is there anyway to have it deleted?

~~~
thegna
Yes, I would like to have the entire page deleted. Do you know what the
procedure is?

~~~
tommorris
Wikipedia isn't opt-out: you can't opt-out of being written about in
newspapers if you do things that make newspapers want to write about you.
Wikipedia doesn't delete stuff just because the subject doesn't like or want
the article. (Plenty of politicians don't like the fact that the articles
about them accurately report the things they've said that they now find
impolitic.) But it may be the case that you aren't notable, in which case we
should delete it.

Easiest thing is to email me - tom@tommorris.org - I'm an admin who has
handled hundreds, possibly thousands, of deletion debates. My Wikipedia
account is here FYI:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tom_Morris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tom_Morris)

Or you can email info-en-q@wikimedia.org and you'll get an email from someone
(possibly me) who is an experienced Wikipedian who'll be able to have a look
at the article and sort out any issues therein, put it under protection if
there's been vandalism etc. or nominate it for deletion if it doesn't meet the
notability requirements.

The 'Contact Wikipedia' link is at the bottom of every page and the email
addresses are linked from there -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us)

------
ChuckMcM
I am always amused by articles saying how silly social media visibility is,
and they have a giant bar of "share this" iconography on them. Either you care
or you don't.

------
joetech
I don't see the problem. If you're playing on Facebook all day rather than
working, perhaps that discussion at your annual review is needed. I get on
Facebook and Twitter occasionally at work, but not enough that it would impact
my work and consequently, not enough that I'd worry about anyone knowing how
much I'm on social networks.

------
piyush_soni
I actually see one good use of Klout. If I have a critical information I'd
like to be shared across to most people in a short span (in such a manner it
has the most impact), I'll simply choose one of my friends who has the highest
Klout score, simply because people really take him seriously. They might not
take myself that seriously :P.

------
gexla
An absolute disaster for my productivity would be getting a performance review
which accounts for my Hacker News karma score.

------
tlrobinson
Are they showing some non-public score to companies, or is this just the same
public score available to anyone?

------
bdg
Alternative title: "Quick, everyone, authenticate your twitter account with
Klout!"

------
mathattack
All the comments so far are about opting in because we're concerned the boss
thinks we're not visible enough online. What if it's a little more
nefarious.... Companies want to use it to see who is wasting time online?

------
NirDremer
I'm guessing the people who spend all day on Facebook will get a raise :)

------
nsxwolf
The Klout score is a joke. My score never falls below 56, which I hear is
pretty good, and I am in no way influential. I hardly ever tweet and have
maybe 12 followers.

~~~
ohjeez
Actually, it's not all that great. That score doesn't suck, but it'd be
nothing to brag about (among those for whom Klout scores are any kind of
bragging).

~~~
nsxwolf
Well, honestly, I feel my score should be somewhere near 0. My score is high
enough to qualify me for silly promotions like free access to the American
Airlines Admiral's Club, and is 10 to 20 points higher than other people I
know who I would actually consider influential.

------
abrahamsen
I don't get it? Why would my employer care how many cat pictures I share?

~~~
toble
I guess not everyone posts cat pictures.

If people really want to avoid having their social media activities catching
up with them, then make sure that you give [potential] employers completely
different contact details. Ideally, have a separate email address for each
social media service and never link them together.

------
sambeau
...Says the guy with 14 social network 'clicky' buttons :)

------
spot
doesn't google do the same thing? i don't see the problem here. they collect
public info, run it through their proprietary algo, and try to monetize the
results. so what?

~~~
ceejayoz
Google doesn't give you a Google+ page that looks like you deliberately
created it but is actually based on whatever they could find about you.

------
tehwebguy
Maybe when they stop sending me free gift cards.

