If you logged into Feedburner in the last few days, then you would have surely noticed a change in their login screen. It looks like this now:
The fine print at the bottom says that, if you want to stop Google from getting your data then opt-out of the service before June 15th 2007. In essence this means that ‘The privacy policy of Feedburner becomes null and void from 15th June 2007 and Google’s Privacy policy becomes enforceable on all Feedburner users from June 15th 2007‘.
If you opt-out then
- Account gets deleted
- Feed is nullified
- All statistics are lost
First and foremost, this is wonderful on the part of Feedburner that they are willing to provide an opt-out clause like this. The trend that I have observed is that if a company X buys Y, then all data which reside with Y become part of X, with no say from the users of the service of company Y. This initiative from Feedburner will provide those paranoid anti-Google users a chance to opt-out and ensure that their data doesn’t fall in the hands of Google. I don’t know if providing an opt-out clause after an acquisition can be made a law, but if companies abide by this in principle then it is great.
Frankly, I don’t see too many concerns with Google having access to this data. First and foremost, if you have been a web user for the last decade then Google will most probably know more about you than Feedburner. The biggest issue now is that Google owns the feed and if you don’t want Google to access your data, then your feed is lost forever. This will be a huge loss to blogger’s and publishers who have a long list of subscribers to their Feedburner feeds.
The other concern is that: Will Google add adWords to the feeds without compensating the publishers? I certainly feel they won’t do this without compensating the publishers but only time will tell. This acquisition will no doubt provide Google with better reach for their adwords and adsense campaigns.
[...] Feedburner Users: 2 days before Google gets your data [...]