Anonymity is an important thing in todays world but is largely missing in the online world. I personally think we may be on the verge of moving down a much slippery sloper that allows various vendors like Google to acquire technology companies that allow Google to have a complete profile of nearly every person on the net. If you think of the aggregated data they now can cross check and index along with associating with you now is truly staggering.

The rumored possible acquisition of FeedBurner really made me think about what data sets Google has access to. If you think about it when you tie in Google Analytics, Google Gmail, Google Search, Google Desktop Search, Google Adsense, the acquisition of Double Click and the possible acquisition of Feedburner this combo will results in a combination of data sets that will give Google all of the data to track very precisely what each of us do online.

Sure every domain on the net does not use all of the above Google services but the multitude of combinations of data that they have, will allow them to track each and every one of us at a micro/macro level that has never been possible before.

Sadly their is little we can do about it, the only hope we have is that smart third parties like yourselves are reviewing and cross checking all of the various Googles Terms of Service to make sure that the combination of services they have do not open up data sharing across properties.

While we have been tracked online for a long time and many of us largely deal with it, their may be a time in the near future where we need to have net safety zones, where spying on audiences and readers is not tolerated.