Klout Is Shutting Down Just In Time to Not Reveal How Much It Knew About Us

Klout, the service which measured online influence and assigned people a zero-to-100 score based on their social media followings, will shut down on May 25. Everyone’s Klout scores will go away, and with them, any remaining chance that businesses will treat us better or worse based on those scores. But the data Klout gathered from people presumably lives on. Lithium Technologies, the social-media marketing company that bought Klout in 2014, implied in its announcement that it has integrated Klout’s software and data into its own products.