Tynt’s Chief Operating Officer Talks About Privacy | Hacker News Reader

Tynt’s Chief Operating Officer Talks About Privacy

tynt.com

11 pointsdomino14 comments

timdoug offers one-line opt-out (in /etc/hosts):

  127.0.0.1       tcr.tynt.com

...and this is cross-browser and doesn't disappear when I clear my cookies.

BTW, are there any advantages to either that or

    0.0.0.0 tcr.tynt.com


?

No.

No. They're both "reserved" loop-back addresses, but 127.0.0.1 has more cultural/conventional weight for this explicit purpose and also avoids any possible semantic overloads with dotted-quad zero and/or null values.

Thanks.

Since I have a local web server running that will respond on 127.0.0.1 I'd just as soon avoid the overhead of the wasted hit and rendering of the local page, unless there was some notable value to using that address over all nulls.

Your local webserver will likely also respond on 0.0.0.0; if you bind to a port on 0.0.0.0, you listen on all interfaces, which is the default in apache.

Ah, interesting. Thanks.

Indeed. Tynt is an absolute abomination going against both basic clipboard usability and Web content mores.

I will forevermore pronounce Tynt as taint.

Careful with this line:

iVillage who have realized 800,000 new visits thanks to Tynt’s link-back service

No it's not visits: the linked case study says 800k links. Mind you, that's also very good (from an SEO perspective), but it is a very important detail to clarify.

"WARNING! Tynt Blocker has detected Tynt.com's tracer script in use on this site."

I can't recommend this Chrome extension enough. :)

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/achmnghbfplhfomh...

Why the need to alert you? To me, that seems just as annoying as Tynt.

Late reply: yes, it's annoying, but thankfully not many folks seem to have rolled this out. You receive a single popup for a given domain, confirming that you want to block tynt for that site; the page is then reloaded, sans tynt.

There's another extension based on Tynt Blocker (named, creatively, Tynt Blocker 2) that doesn't ask for confirmation first:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ajefkgbbbikgjalb...

From a PR review I thought it was clear messaging - understanding but not apologetic and got me to read their case study - well played tynt, well played

The opt-out page has been there for weeks; it's nothing new.

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