Klout is a service that purports to measure your influence across social media channels. The purpose of this post is not to render judgement on that concept but rather to show how to opt out. It was not a terribly intuitive process so I thought others might be interested in how to go about it.
The thing about Klout is that, if you are on Twitter, a profile has probably already been helpfully established for you. You don’t seem to have to do anything to get one. For example, the profile for my company can be found here: http://klout.com/zekiah. We’ve never logged into it or otherwise connected to it in any way but it exists and is scoring us. A profile also existed for my personal Twitter ID and for my blog.
In full disclosure, I participated in Klout for a while to see what it was all about and decided it wasn’t for me. Others may be into it and that’s fine but, once I decided I wasn’t interested, I wanted to delete my profile. I successfully deleted my personal profile and then walked through the steps again for my blog’s profile in order to write this post. Here’s what I did:
Step 1: Connect to Klout and Go To Profile Settings
If you have been using Klout, you already know how to do this. If not, you’ll need to enter your Twitter ID and authorize Klout to access your Twitter account (don’t worry, we’ll reverse this later). Once you are in Klout use the pull-down menu next to the gear icon to access your profile settings (see the red box on the image below)
Step 2: Access Klout Privacy Policy Page
Once on your profile settings page, scroll all the way down until you see the text “Klout values your privacy. Click here to learn more.” Click on the hyperlink.
Step 3: Starting the Opt-Out Process
On the privacy policy page, scroll all the way down to the “Use of Data” section and you’ll see another “click here” link that start the opt-out process.
Step 4: Thanks But No Thanks
The next page tells you about all of the benefits of Klout. Scroll down to the “We Value Your Privacy” section and you’ll see two links. If you want to continue with the opt-out process, you want to click the less flashy of the two links.
Step 5: Complete the Opt-Out Process
The opt-out page requires some information from you. You need to supply a reason for opting out, then you need to “sign” (type) your name and click “Submit”. There’s very little guidance on the signing your name part so I made sure it matched the name I provided when I set up my Klout profile. You many also want to provide a “further explanation” but that’s not required.
After you click the “Submit” link, you should get a popup message like this:
That should be everything you need to do inside of Klout. If you type the URL to your Klout profile (http://klout.com/{profile name}), then you should see a cute puppy telling you that the profile has no data or something similar. You are almost done.
Step 6: Revoke Access to Your Twitter Account
Earlier, you granted Klout permission to access your Twitter account. Now that you’re done with Klout, you want to remember to revoke that access. You’ll need to do that from your Twitter account settings.
At this point, you should be done. If you had linked your Klout profile to any other social networks, it may be prudent to explicitly revoke any permissions on those networks as well. When I was searching for how to do this, I determined that this process has changed at least once. Given that Klout is still in beta, it may change again but this is how it works for now.
