Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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how private are RSS feeds? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by lemmyrolinga@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

28 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How could anyone find out which sites are you following using an RSS feed? And I mean in a broad way: can the site track you? Can ISP? Network managers?

Let's say you want to follow a bunch of political sites that you don't want to be easily attached to, is RSS a good way to do it? Are there extra precautions to take?

My first thought would be that it's the same as using any other browser, so not a great way to be private. Am I wrong?

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[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Depends on your threat model. If you use secure DNS and https for the RSS feed, then these people would know your IP and the IP you're connecting to:

the DNS provider
the RSS server
your ISP/ VPN server

Your ISP or VPN will know you've made a TCP connection to that server at a specified port, but that's it. It's trivial for them to reverse lookup the IP back into a name.

Only the RSS server will know the specific URL you're visiting though.

[–] Cadende@hexbear.net 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Only the RSS server will know the specific URL you're visiting though.

and the site itself!

[–] acockworkorange@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They are one and the same.

[–] Cadende@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago

jeez I wasn't reading very carefully. I read that as "Only the RSS reader"