Recently I learned about a product called Tynt Tracer.
It’s a small piece of Javascript you can embed on your Web site, and it appears to have two main benefits: you can track what text people are copying off your site, and when people paste that text elsewhere, it adds a “read more” note with the URL of the article the text came from.
The benefits of this to Webmasters are obvious:
- you can see what text people most often copy from your site, and
- you can use it to track plagiarists.
When people see your “read more” URL upon pasting the copied text, they are reminded that it might be worthwhile to attribute the information to your site.
One Web site using Tynt Tracer is the Daily Mail. Try it out. Go to a Mail article, copy some text (more than just a few words) and paste it into a text editor. You should see the “read more” note.
Should Web sites using Tynt Tracer inform the reader that they are using it?
Many sites (including this one) use some form of analytics software to monitor what people are reading. Webmasters use this data for a variety of reasons: determining which articles are the most popular, selling advertisements or simply satisfying curiosity.
Most do not overtly tell readers they are using such software. I believe most people these days assume their Web-surfing habits are being watched to some degree.
Tynt Tracer is really just another kind of analytics software, so what’s the hang-up?
When I request and view a Web page, my computer is contacting another person’s computer to retrieve that information, so it seems logical that the activity could be tracked.
But (and perhaps this is naive or old-fashioned) when I copy and paste text on my computer, it feels like an activity confined to my computer. I have already retrieved the Web page from the site’s server; what I do with it after that is nobody’s business.
And to what extent are a single person’s copying and pasting habits monitored by Tynt Tracer?
An easy solution for tech-savvy people is to install NoScript for Firefox and block it because Tynt Tracer is Javascript-based.
But many Web surfers doesn’t know about NoScript, so asking them to install a piece of software to protect their privacy (to whatever extent it may be infringed upon by Tynt Tracer) is a bit much.
I don’t have a solid opinion on this yet. I see what I perceive to be the advantages and disadvantages. But I would love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below!
Further reading:
- Tynt Tracer
- Monitor Content Copying On Your Site Using Tynt Tracer – Makeuseof
- Is Tynt Tracer a Boon for Bloggers? – InternetNews.com
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Disclosure: I work for Tynt.
…and I welcome the discussion on the topic you’ve brought forward. It is very important to us that we make it clear that Tynt doesn’t track any personally identifiable information — we don’t see ourselves as an ‘enforcement tool’ but rather an automated bibliography (for the end user) and a user engagement monitoring tool for the content publisher.
Let me point out how Tynt Tracer actually works. You are correct that it tracks a user’s engagement on a website much like any other analytics tool (Google Analytics, Omniture, Webtrends, etc) however we believe that the more useful information is not necessarily page views and ‘time on page’, but rather, what pages (and content) specifically draw a user to take action and share (or preserve) that content.
As an added feature of the tool, publishers can have an attribution link added to any text that is copied. This attribution link is feature optional (on by default) and is added to the copied text as it moves from the web page into the users clipboard dynamically. From there, we aren’t actually ‘in’ a user’s PC at all. When the paste of the clipboard occurs, the user can certainly remove the attribution link if desired. If the link is ever clicked upon, we can see that information through the referring links in the analytics side, in the same way that other web analytics tools work. I assure you there is nothing executing outside of the browser on your PC!
We are very transparent with what we are doing and I welcome the discussion and any suggestions as the tool is still in Beta and we are continuing to make modifications to it as we move towards a shipping product.
Cheers!
Derek
I think it’s a cool idea! Started using it and I’m happy with it. The only problem that I do have with it is, that all those codes are tracked in Omniture’s Site Catalyst – is there any way to get them ignored? Or hidden? Thanks.
More @ http://twitter.com/mostpopularpage#follow_me
[...] 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 is much more invasive than Derek would have us think. If you simply *select* some text — no copying or pasting — Tynt can/will send that text to Tynt. Even if “Tynt doesn’t track any personally identifiable information” they certainly have the power to do so. Do you want to trust them?
Here is a link showing how you can verify this behaviour:
http://activerain.com/blogsview/1159317/have-you-tynt-ed-your-blog-yet-#5029815
My approach is to nuke these kinds of invasive anti-internet cancers by dropping their domain names into my hosts file as 127.0.0.1 (actually, I usually point them at my web server so the connections work and 404 quickly) and add their IP ranges to my firewall. My machines never connect to the likes of quantserve or google-analytics.. or tynt, as soon as I do a few lookups and go see how some sites that use them work.
The ability to capture and alter information that is cut from a website is a new concept and needs to be evaluted from a privacy perspective as indicated in the article. My concern is that the collection of information may be used to identify personal informatoin associated with an IP address or cookie and could span across multiple websites. It also seems possible to alter content that is copied based on unknown rules to the end user, resulting in frustration of the user and the devaluing of the cut and paste function.
This is not just analytics.
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.