Feedburner BURNS Leo
From Leo himself:
As some of you probably know, we pump our RSS feed through Feedburner. Feedburner processes the feed and generates some stats from it. I’ve always had some misgivings about using Feedburner – if anything should happen to them our feed would go down. In addition, there are some privacy issues – they see the IP address of every click that goes through them.
Unfortunately I didn’t trust my gut and went ahead and used Feedburner. In fact, a great many podcasters use Feedburner. It provides a real convenience. But at a cost.
Yesterday Information Week published an article about podcasting quoting Feedburner’s VP Business Development, Rick Klau. Klau quoted a figure of 41,000 for our subscribers. This is in direct violation of Feedburners stated privacy policy, and I consider it a real breach of trust. This information is proprietary and they don’t have my permission to disclose it to any third party. It also damages us materially since he severely understated our subscriber base. We have 100,000 downloads per show from AOL alone.
I’m moving all my feeds off Feedburner and to a server I can trust – mine. I apologize to you for using Feedburner and for the inconvenience this may cause.
I have sent a letter out to FeedBurner asking for a response, and it will be posted as soon as they comment.
UPDATE:
Here is their tentative response:
Hey Dan … we’re talking with Leo right now. The issue, just so you know, is that he had turned on the public Awareness API on his feed, so his numbers were available to sites like http://www.podfeed.net/feedburner_rankings.asp and http://www.podnova.com/index_feedburner_top40.srf . Rick was just commenting from those publically available numbers. We’re refraining from commenting until we get square with Leo since we’re such fans. But we’ll totally stay on top of this and change how the service works if it’s unclear.
So for now I suggest your turn OFF your FeedBurner API.
UPDATE: Rick of FeedBurn has an official comment
