Feed privacy gone wrong

Feed optimization and analytics provider FeedBurner where recently acquired by Google. This literally means Google have gained control over more than 753 450 feeds and an undisclosed number of subscriptions to each one of those feeds. Your feed consumption habits are now a part of the Google family.

Feeds and privacy

Google can soon combine your feed usage with your web searches and all the rest they know about you. This is data about what you read, and what you really care about! (Otherwise you would not be subscribed, right?)

441 400 publishers and counting are using FeedBurner's services. (Including me.) There are more than 753 450 feeds with only FeedBurner knows how many subscribers per feed. This is massive consumption data that can easily be used to serve personalized search results (read: advertisements).

Changes in this blog's feeds

I will pull all my feeds off FeedBurner within a couple of weeks. They are so tightly integrated with FeedBurner's services so it will take a while to change it. I hope the URLs will not have to change, but I cannot promise anything.

I will use the self-hosted analytics tool Mint instead. I am doing experimental implementation of Mint on one site and will see how that goes…

Disclaimer: I am no fan of Google or any other big multimillion corporation that I feel knows way to much about me.