Tynt Insight Is Watching You Cut and Paste

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 14, 2010 @06:31AM from the peeking-at-your-poke dept.

jerryasher writes "In recent weeks I've noticed that when I copy and paste text from Wired and other websites, the pasted text has had the URL of the original website appended to it. Cool, and utterly annoying, and how do I make that stop? Tynt Insight is a piece of Javascript that sends what you copy to Tynt's webservers and adds the backlinks. Tynt calls that a service for the site owner, many people call that a privacy invasion. Worse, there are some reports that it sends not just what you copy, but everything you select. And Tynt provides no opt outs. Not cookie-based, not IP-based, but stop-it-you-creeps-angry-phone-call-based. It ain't a pure useful service, and it ain't a pure privacy invasion. But I sure wish they'd go away or have had the decency never to start up in the first place. I block it on Firefox with Ghostery."

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Re:Thought JavaScript clipboard was opt in? by dlgeek · 2010-01-14 08:41 · Score: 0, Flamebait

He was modded down as overrated. +1 funny -1 overrated is not a wash because funny gives no karma. My guess is some mod who thought it was funny was trying to make sure he didn't get hurt by it. You can lose karma on a +5 post if you keep getting downmodded and upmodded back as funny.