John Gruber’s post on Daring Fireball alerted me to the Tynt service that many web sites are using. What basically happens is that when you visit a Tynt-enabled web site, a javascript is loaded which feeds information of what you copy back to the web site. At some sites, when you paste the text, an attribution gets automatically added…effectively muddling up your copy and paste.
I don’t have an expectation of privacy on the web and I understand how my data can be fairly easily tracked. At the most basic level, however, it’s an annoying “feature” to have to modify my pasted text from various web sites. You can turn it off quite easily with a plugin if you’re using Chrome. If you don’t use Chrome, you can simply add this to your host file, which will direct all requests for javascripts from Tynt to your local computer…so the scripts won’t be loaded. Just add:
127.0.0.1 tcr.tynt.com
to your hosts file.