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Comment by andre3k1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm left wondering if both Wired.com and PerezHilton.com are going to be subjected to the same sort of lawsuit.

Related: http://techme.me/ANFk ("YouPorn, Perez Hilton Exploit Bug to Obtain Your Browsing History")

At the risk of sounding like a corporate apologist since I write for Wired.com, Wired.com did NOT use the javascript history hack. It was noted in the report for using Tynt.com, which notices which portions of a story a reader copies and pastes and inserts a link back to the story. Wired.com has since stopped using the service, in no small part because it annoyed the writers, but it never, to my knowledge and to the report's findings, secretly captured users' browser histories. You can read the full report's findings at the following link: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/users/lerner/papers/ccs10-jsc.pdf.

Hey. Just a suggestion, but maybe it would have been better from a PR standpoint to come clean with your viewers in a blog post.

Explain how it happened without your knowledge. Explain how Wired won't let it ever happen again. Etc. Etc.

Readers love the transparency :)

I'm not sure there's really anything to report back. Tynt is fairly widely used, and is really nothing more than a piece of javascript that watches copy and paste and inserts a link back to the original story into the paste buffer. It's annoying, but there's no profiling going on and is far less of a tracking system than say Google Analytics. It's just more annoying.

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