Reena from SpeedPPC has just written a great article about something that’s concerned me for years–Google as “Big Brother”.

To put it bluntly, you’re incredibly naive if you think that Google is giving you all of these “free” tools out of the goodness of their hearts. By using google analytics you are in effect giving them the keys to your business. They know who visits your sites, how long they stay, how they found your site, what they do, when they convert (if you have conversion tracking setup) and more. Do you think that’s a good idea? I sure don’t. Combine that with the fact that you’re also buying traffic from them and it’s extra scary. A couple of times in the past after I added conversion tracking in adwords my minimum bids mysteriously went up. Hmmm, coincidence? I don’t think so.

I’ll just leave it at that. You can read Reena’s article where she lays out more details.