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?