Have you "Tynt"ed your blog yet?

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.

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

Here's a perfect example, Jim. I enabled a packet monitor, went to your blog page, and highlighted the phrase:

Not too much difference here compared to this past May except the dramatic upturn in sales in past months of June seemed to start earlier.

If I was selling my home and went to my realtor's site and discovered that they were using this privacy-invading stuff, I'd explain how annoyed I was that they were transferring every visit I made to their site to a third party and then I'd fire them.  Or I wouldn't explain it and just politely thank them for their time and move on to another realtor. YMMV.

Jim Lee wrote: " Don't like Tynt, don't copy stuff from where I'm using it."

I'd say, "Don't like Tynt, don't visit websites that use it."

Like yours.

As others have said, there are many reasons to select text on a page. Most of it isn't to steal your precious words. There's totally no reason for them to send the data back to their servers other than for tracking/sales/revenue. Scary.

I wouldn't use an agent who had that on his/her page.

randy

I use FireFox and have the Ghostery add-on which can block Tynt

Good point Tom, and I think the NoScript add-on will also do the trick.

Jim,

I understand your frustration. For over a decade I ran one of the largest and oldest music & digital news websites. It was highly ranked in Google and Alexa. We were getting 2.5M hits monthly, about 20-30% of them unique. Understandably there was some poaching of text.

At first I was upset - I'd spend hours each week tracing down copies of my articles - then I had a revelation.

My articles aren't unique. If I hadn't written them, someone else would have. The way I word them may have been more or less interesting, but people were still coming to my site in vast numbers - they weren't going to other sites that were copying my text. I was making enough cash to make me happy, so what more could I want?

I opened up the entire bloody thing - many thousands of articles and tens of thousands of man-hours - on the Creative Commons license.

My content is not so unique that it requires violating my readers trust - and neither is yours.

Joe M

Just out of curiosity,

To those that are upset by Tynt tracking text copying/selecting events, why is this anymore upsetting than, say, Google Analytics tracking every page you view and every link you click at a site? Nearly every site uses that or something like it, yet you hear little about anyone wanting to disable javascript because of it. Why is Tynt any more offensive?