- Jun 24, 2001
- 24,195
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It was exactly as I thought
TinyURL. DOES pass requests through an advertisement agency who watches and records usage statistics. They probably didn't back then, but it's strange that the creator himself REFUSED to acknowledge the possability when I grilled him about it...
If you can make sense of it... Here:
TinyURL. DOES pass requests through an advertisement agency who watches and records usage statistics. They probably didn't back then, but it's strange that the creator himself REFUSED to acknowledge the possability when I grilled him about it...
If you can make sense of it... Here:
Thank you for calming my fears. However, may I make a suggestion? I am hesitant to use the service with my informational message board posts because I am worried that the message may be archived forever but the solution linked to in it is now twice as likely to disappear. Is there any chance that the service could be made distributed or the database open-source? I'm sure Slashdot.com could find some very talented developers to make a decent toolbar and distributed database and open-source would certainly erase any suspicion of tracking users to websites the service isn't even affiliated with through these linksI'd imagine that you could make a pretty cool search engine considering that the stuff people link to is usually the stuff that's relevant to searches. Call Google?
-Julian Emmett Turner
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Gilbertson [mailto:email@gilby.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 8:20 PM
To: J.E.Turner
Subject: Re: Your TinyURL service: What's in it for you?
J.E.Turner wrote:
> If I had the resources and the idea (Good one! Congratulations.), I
> would have created a site very similar to yours and also provided the
> service for free, so I find it perfectly possible that you may be
> doing this out of the goodness of your own heart. HOWEVER, the nature
> of the site (collecting and storing URLs) seems to be a data-mining operation.
> That?s 100% OK as long as it simply tracks which URLs are more popular
> and what-not and sells the statistics to certain interested parties,
> but you could also track users and provide personally identifiable
> information to advertisers (IP addresses, etc). The references to
> hiding affiliations make this suspicion stronger. The notably absent
> privacy policy certainly seems suspicious in this day and age. Why
> isn't the URL database open to the public? I mean, if you think about
> it, what happens when his site goes down, possibly for good? Are the
> real URLs linked to in thousands of message board posts lost forever?
> NONE of the ?internet archive? projects are up to that task!
We store each URL that is inputed, obviously. We store no personl information (after all, you never gave any of it to us anyways) and we actually delete our server logs daily. We do not do any data mining. We get revenue from the ads that are on the main page and from the donations. This more than covers the expense of the server to run this service.
We do not intend to close this site.
Affiliation. It is clearly mentioned on the bottom of the page that the site is run by "Gilby Productions" which is the name I run my business activities as.
> One more issue: A toolbar button, while convenient, just SCREAMS
> ?spy-ware? to anyone who sees it.
Look at the code, it's pretty simple:
javascript:void(location.href='http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url='+location.href)
As you can see, the only thing it does is, when clicked, it gets the URL of the page you're at and sends it to TinyURL to create a TinyURL for that URL.
> I hope it isn?t. Internet Explorer
> even warns you that it ?may not be safe!?
I think it does that since there is javascript in it.
- Gilby
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