It’s probably not just me who thinks this, but Google’s knowledge of and access to the inner workings of people’s online businesses is becoming very disturbing.

And yet people are still letting Google get away with it. The introduction of Google Checkout (which has just launched here in the UK) is just another example of this.

The combination of free transaction processing until 2008 with a £10 off orders over £30 offer for customers using Google Checkout is, on the face of it, an extremely attractive proposition.

However, the reality of the situation is that you are giving Google access to information it shouldn’t really have. They will know your best selling products, your average basket size and more.

God forbid that you should be using Google Analytics or the Google Adwords conversion tracking tool as well. In that case, you might as well hand the management of your entire business over to Google as they will know the conversion ratio of all your keywords, they will know the most common paths of your visitors, they will know where your conversion process breaks down. They will, know, quite literally, everything that your marketing department knows.

And you can bet that they will be using this information at some point in the future. Otherwise, why give away free tools like Google Analytics in the first place?

You can be certain that minimum bid prices for certain keywords will start to increase as the oh-so-benevolent Google squeeze the margins of their advertisers. And that, of course, is just a starting point.

Repeat after me : ‘I will stop handing Google extremely valuable and private business information for FREE’. OK, got that.

Right? Now, stop doing it. You will only damage your own business in the long run.

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