Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jabbles | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Ah, I see - wow. Things make more sense. Thanks.

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 ?

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

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.

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.

Just public profiles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com