I wouldn't say it's exactly what they do. First of all, you end up reading the news through Blendle, where you have to see all kinds of news you don't want to see (in particular giving Blendle the opportunity to become a gigantic tracker); then (it's only available in a few countries so far) by far not all big publishers are on board, and finally it's not transparent how much of what you pay on Blendle makes it back to the original newspaper.
edit: Having to go through the Blendle site also means if you're looking at an article on wsj.com from a few months ago you won't be able to jump to the Blendle version to the best of my knowledge. Archives aren't Blendle's thing.
edit: Basically, I'd like to say: Don't sign up for Blendle.
Yes, also I'd highly prefer a universal solution by a big company like Google (who already tracks everything anyway, but can be trusted to a high degree).
I think we're still very far from peak tracking if there is such a thing. Imagine I know all the books you've bought within the last 10 years, how scary is that? Certainly a bit scary if I know the shopping habits of millions of customers to which I can then relate you and (maybe because they've filled out surveys that you haven't?) learn the approximate income of your household (so that maybe I'll start showing you higher prices?).
It gets quite a bit scarier if I have the computing power and access to the full texts of all those books (like Amazon and Google Books do) to search for patterns in those texts that tell me about your fears, political affiliation, sexual desires, etc.
edit: I'm not sure what you mean by trusting Google. I trust Google to get the technical side of things right.
edit: Having to go through the Blendle site also means if you're looking at an article on wsj.com from a few months ago you won't be able to jump to the Blendle version to the best of my knowledge. Archives aren't Blendle's thing.
edit: Basically, I'd like to say: Don't sign up for Blendle.