[CurtHagenlocher]

Why does Klout in particular seem to piss off so many people? If the text he cites from the Data Protection law were to be interpreted broadly enough to make Klout illegal in the UK, wouldn't it also cover the information about you that Google and Bing collect and process?

[wmf]

Klout was scoring people without asking them, leading to a lot of people getting low scores (effectively being told "you suck at social media"). When there was no opt-out, people felt like they were being cajoled into playing a game that they don't want to play. (Similar concerns were raised about Get Satisfaction.)

"there are many people who don’t wish to be a part of a non-regulated system, and one that can (rightly or wrongly) be used as a third-party validator for expertise."

http://dannybrown.me/2011/10/25/a-letter-to-joe-fernandez-of...

"People are emotionally attached to their score. It is tied to their ego"

It seems mean to go around telling people they suck, especially when those people never asked Klout's opinion. This is like Zynga-style dark gamification.

"Just as an SAT score is used to judge students and a credit score is used to judge financial standing, Fernandez hopes that the Klout score will become an ingredient in job interviews."

So not only does Klout tell everyone that you suck, but they want to hurt your career, too.

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/community/2011/11/03/klout-...

Counterpoint: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/26/nobody-gives-a-damn-about-y...

[Wilya]

My understanding is that Klout crosses the line by creating accounts for people without their consent, and making those hard to delete.

They are different from search engines because they try to link data to a real person (which is mostly what privacy laws try to prevent).

And, contrary to most other social networks, they act without having consent from the user.

[salvadors]

Without defending Klout, who do seem to go somewhat further than others on this front, the Data Protection Law in the UK isn't quite as strict as the post implies. The issue of consent, for example, is part of a chain of ors, not ands — i.e. it's a sufficient but not necessary condition for processing someone's personal data. If consent was always required for anyone to ever do anything with your information, the press, for example, would never be able to publish critical articles about anyone.