Yesterday, measurement service Klout announced that they had added five networks to their score calculations, allowing users to have their composite influence tracked on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, and others.
Klout has monetized in B2C with targeted product sampling and could easily generate B2B dollars by monetizing its APIs. It’s a fun service for consumers, playing into real-life game mechanics by providing system feedback at large for an individual’s social media behavior.
Users don’t actually have to create a Klout account to have a score. For example, Twitter creator and co-founder Jack Dorsey. Rated by his Twitter handle alone, his Klout score is fairly high. However, by creating an account and providing access to your data on other networks, Klout promises that your score will be more accurate and will not go down.
Playing this game comes with a price – paid by your privacy.
I’m a Klout user. I was about to add a couple of the new services and paused when I read the authorization instructions for Flickr:
Think about this. If you’ve made content private, then there’s probably a reason for doing so. For me, family pictures fall into that category – why give Klout access to that data? Although it seems extremely unlikely, why would you want to let Klout replace a picture of Raffles Place with a K+ logo? Or potentially use your account as a marketing vehicle – adding comments or notes on pictures with a message like “looks great! you should try klout.com!”…?
Here’s another authorization request, for YouTube:
While the YouTube inbox isn’t exactly your email inbox, would you want to give a service access to your personal messages? Then again, Klout is adding Google+ access soon and given the service’s close ties to Gmail addresses, assigning access to your messages could be an integration requirement.
But the bottom line is this – most users don’t care about or aren’t aware of these privacy issues. And for many, the data contained in these networks may have little real value anyway. Nevertheless – is the privacy for ego tradeoff worth it?
Great article and I think a service being able to replace your pictures, etc for the tradeoff of higher influence doesn’t make sense. Whether people fully understand the privacy ramifications means the service should work hard to educate users an offer tiered influence benefits based on choice. So, a freemium model, with an opt-in required. Facebook requiring services like their iterating facial recognition applications to be opt out is a dangerous model to emulate. Citing “people don’t need to use Facebook if they don’t like the service” is like hotels videotaping patrons and allowing others to see them and then saying “if you don’t like the practice, don’t stay here.”
I think social currency needs to evolve with something I call Accountability Based Influence, or ABI. Wrote an article for Mashable on the subject and would love your thoughts (URL below). There’s a lot more at stake than just privacy with the evolution of these services-identity and specie based currency chief among them. The services are valuable and useful tools, but need to be utilized with clarity for long-term value proposition for all stakeholders.
Thanks again for the article an here’s the Mashable link: http://mashable.com/2011/07/28/social-media-influence-accountability/