Klout, Twitter and the lost battle for online privacy
Something often amuses me about civil liberties – and in particular – privacy supporters, of which I am one: that we all seem hooked on social media. Most Twitter usage may be to discuss politics or campaign, but a lot of usage also reflects the social side of social media. Likewise, a month doesn’t go by without one of my favourite blogs writing about some new breach of privacy with Facebook. And yet all of those bloggers are on Facebook. I don’t necessarily think it’s hypocrisy, it has just always amused me.
This morning (via Dylan Jones’ column for the Mail), I discovered this piece in the New York Times: “Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored.” The article examines the various social grading sites such as Klout and Twitter Grader. I’ll admit straight away that I am prone to checking Klout (current score: 60) on a semi-regular basis. There is something undeniably self-obsessed about checking these sort of scores, but then if we’re on Twitter we must me relatively self-obsessed anyway right?
What I didn’t know about Klout is that 2,500 companies use Klout’s data for marketing purposes. No longer will it be enough to be in the ABC1 demographic, but you’ll need a high Klout score as well. ‘How to increase your Klout score’ currently only has 134,000 search results, but it could one day match the 62 million results for ‘how to increase web traffic.’
“Last week, Klout revealed that Audi would begin offering promotions to Facebook users based on their Klout score. Last year, Virgin America used the company to offer highly rated influencers in Toronto free round-trip flights to San Francisco or Los Angeles. In Las Vegas, the Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to Cirque du Soleil.”
From a marketing perspective, the benefits are obvious. If I’d just been given a hotel upgrade, it would be on Twitter before I even popped the champagne open.
With Klout, you have to sign up to have your scores logged, but the processes Klout uses work on your publicly available tweets. Like many online services, it is very easy to get caught up in something – such as seeing what your social worth is – before you realise how other people access the data.
As Twitter looks set to be here for quite a while, scoring sites such as this will become more popular with their techniques more refined. There will get to a point where more of our online presence will be included – our blog activity, our commenting, any type of (digital) social interaction. I care a lot about privacy, but I can’t help but feel that online the battle is already lost. That said, if I really cared I would probably delete my Klout account and get off Twitter but I know full well that I won’t. Now let’s see what Twitter Grader is like then.
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