If any of those things are important to you, then it’s no longer a question of *if* you want to give up your privacy, but *who* you care to give it up to. If you use an ISP, the information of what sites you’re visiting is already known to at least one corporate entity (or do you browse through an anonymizing proxy network too?) And how exactly do you send or receive email without it being transmitted in plaintext through goodness knows how many corporate entities’ networks?

I trust Google as much as any corporate entity and much more than most.

Couple of comments though:

“Sort by auto” is explained in their FAQ, it puts feeds with fewer items to the top so that feeds with infrequent postings don’t get lost in the noise. I’d have to try this in practice to see whether I like it.

But neither of the available options is what I actually want: when using software which already tracks what I’ve seen before, why on earth would I want to read stuff in *backwards* order? The “most recent first” organization of blogs is solely in response to the fact that when visiting a blog you don’t know where the reader has read up to yet. It’s a completely inexplicable omission considering how trivial it is to reverse a sort order.

Other concerns I have with Reader also largely come down to the fact that it exposes less options than Bloglines did. Even though I accepted the defaults for several of these, the existence of the option was a valuable indicator that the actual behavior was what I wanted. For example Bloglines let me tell it whether to treat updated items as new or not, so I knew that it *was* treating them as new. With Reader, I have no idea if it does or not.

Ian, the unqualified “greater” means that Google’s RSS is greater than any other RSS reader. Now, if you try Vienna, for example, you’ll see that in addition to keeping Google’s eyes away from your privacy, and allowing you to save and read the articles offline on a well organized library, it also has custom css styles to purge the articles from advertisements and to format them with your choice of font and page outline. I’ve designed my custom css, and it is a pleasure for the eyes, clean and unclattered. So, I’ve specific reasons to say that Vienna is better than Google’s RSS, and, as far as I could see, to any other RSS reader to date.

>I’m willing to let Google know what sites I’m visiting

I am not.

>If you’re not, that’s fine too.

I value privacy a lot. It is a human right. Do not give up your basic rights, our fathers have died to give them to us.