Why You Should Delete Your Klout and TrustCloud Accounts and Remove All Your Data

These scores may be useful (the TrustCloud one much more than the Klout one), but in the process these sites have to gather a lot of public and private data across different networks on my behalf. Otherwise they obviously wouldn’t be able calculate a score. This creates serious privacy issues.

Klout’s Serious Privacy Issues

While the scores are opaque and nobody knows if the scoring is reasonable or not, at least TrustCloud has a real benefit. If you create a new account on a site which needs a certain level of trust between users for making the whole idea work, a TrustCloud account can help. Think accommodation like AirBnB, tasks like TaskRabbit, or projects like Elance. Apart from that, Klout hasn’t much benefit for the user, but a lot for Klout. They get all the user’s data while the user only gets a vanity number to show off. Even Klout perks are problematic.

Account Deletion

Accounts on both services can easily be deleted. Don’t forget to not only remove the network connections on Klout and TrustCloud, but also the access to your profiles on the network’s pages like Facebook, Twitter etc. themselves.

Hopefully they delete the data during account deletion and don’t keep it around. Sometimes companies just hide the data from the user and pretend to have deleted all data.