As far as I can tell, the claim of automatically creating accounts is 100% false. So is that of automatically Tweeting or Facebook sharing.
If you sign in to Klout, you'll get fairly in-your-face pitches to invite friends to it. Should you choose to send such an invite, the friend you sent it to would have to respond to this and manually OAuth their account. Similarly, sharing an action taken on Klout to Facebook or Twitter is a manual process. I don't remember seeing any "dark patterns"* at work at all here - nothing is sent automatically, there's no sneaky small print or prefilled checkbox, etc.
It seems the author is also confusing account creation with the service requesting and storing public data from Twitter. Twitter's own privacy policy (https://twitter.com/privacy) is clear re: content being available to search engines and via API. If people do not want their Tweets to be available to search engines and third-party sites that comply with Twitter's policies, they can set their Twitter profiles to private, or can use a service that does not have such an open ecosystem.
If you sign in to Klout, you'll get fairly in-your-face pitches to invite friends to it. Should you choose to send such an invite, the friend you sent it to would have to respond to this and manually OAuth their account. Similarly, sharing an action taken on Klout to Facebook or Twitter is a manual process. I don't remember seeing any "dark patterns"* at work at all here - nothing is sent automatically, there's no sneaky small print or prefilled checkbox, etc.
It seems the author is also confusing account creation with the service requesting and storing public data from Twitter. Twitter's own privacy policy (https://twitter.com/privacy) is clear re: content being available to search engines and via API. If people do not want their Tweets to be available to search engines and third-party sites that comply with Twitter's policies, they can set their Twitter profiles to private, or can use a service that does not have such an open ecosystem.
* http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/Home