How Google Owns YOUR FeedBurner History
The “conversation” ensuing between “good guys” Dave Winer and Fred Wilson re: “FeedBurner, friend or foe,” misses the boat, the Google corporate privacy boat that is.
In Free FeedBurner? The HIGH Price You Pay I underscore how there is NO such thing as a “free” Google service.
Any analysis of FeedBurner’s motivations must by definition be an analysis of the Googleplex’s ambitions.
Google does nothing without a quid pro quo. With FeedBurner, Google follows its good Google Anlaytics tradition of knowing, for perpetuity, the ins and outs of every single move made at Websites, and now their off-site interactions as well.
Google announced upon its acquisition of Feedburner:
If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google.
So, In acquiring FeedBurner, then, Google not only acquired the business assets of one company, it acquired ownership of the proprietary data of hundreds of thousands of Websites as well.
As readers of Insider Chatter know, what goes in Google server farms, stays in Google server farms, regardless of any eventual service “switching.”
Google’s Positini acquisiton is headed down a similar your corporate data will be Google’s data, forever, track as well, as I have been documenting and analyzing.
SEE: How Commtouch Wins in Google Postini Enterprise Battle and Google Buys Postini PLUS 500 million Email Secrets
Beware Feedburner, and all Google acquisitions.
ALSO: Africa NOT Online: Will ‘Open’ Google ‘Put Up or Shut Up’? and Google, Yahoo Click Fraud Audit Minefield Looms: Look to the IAB?