Tynt is a spyware company. Their "tracer" violates the privacy of people visiting webpages by communicating with tynt.com as soon as any text is selected... in effect, looking over the shoulders of readers, without their consent. By definition, spyware.

So yes, "taynting" your blog is a wonderful idea if you want to drive readers away.

Hi Jim,

The information I have comes from original research that anyone can replicate:

(1) Fire up tcpdump or any other packet logging/inspection software

(2) Load a page that uses the tracker, eg, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1202192/Muslims-refuse-use-alcohol-based-hand-gels-religious-beliefs.html

(3) Select any non-trivial sized bit of the content text on the page

(4) Observe traffic to tynt

Note that this does not require the user to actually copy -- just select. There are many reasons someone might select text other than copying it, such as to say "hey, look at this sentence!" to someone reading along with them. Unless they actually copy and paste (and notice the inserted attribution) the average user would have no idea that tynt, a third party, had been made aware of their IP address (inherent in the traffic generated) and (presumably, otherwise what's the point?) the page viewed and very possibly the range of text that was selected.

To assume that the selected text is somehow the more compelling is foolish as well; someone could be ridiculing it for grammar or spelling.

In any case, I've blocked traffic to tynt and any pages using this "service" will throw up a dialog box. This tells me "these people don't respect my privacy, so I'll take my business elsewhere"

I'd also note that while the entire notion of attribution is good from a copyright standpoint, tynt is also pitching it as an SEO technique. Search engines have caught on to link farms, so this is their method to continue link spamming in pursuit of page rank: enlist the help of those who might quote (under the Fair Use doctrine) a website, violating their privacy in the process.

Oddly, the example I gave (dailymail.co.uk) is (d'oh!) in the UK, which from what I gather has some pretty strict data protection laws. So I'm off to read up on those.