"without the need to give up control of your data or privacy."

Except that there's an anonymity that comes with being in a crowd. Accessing a blog via Google Reader means that one copy is fetched for all users of Google Reader and only Google "knows" who the reader is. Accessing a blog directly means the src IP is disclosed, which is more revealing to the individual blog operators.

I know it's fashionable to assume that Google is the privacy enemy, and it's certainly wise to be cautious, but portraying this alternative as not giving up privacy shows that you're only concerned with protecting against Google, not with considering all the directions that the privacy can be compromised from.

Eg: I like to avoid the echo chamber effect of only reading blogs from people with similar views, which means reading text from various people I disagree with. The people on that list can change with time, and occasionally there are some real kooks on it. I like having an intermediary between me and them. Heck, some of them are nutjobs who believe in a political party! ;)

Now, if you set up rsslounge to use Tor or the like, then yes you have much more privacy than with Google and the batch-background-update model of RSS readers is a good fit for the latencies of Tor. I didn't see Tor integration listed though.