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

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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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[–] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 7 points 1 week ago

The comment thus far are a little oversimplified... Yes, the feed is just an XML document, same as the HTML page, but there are several relevant differences. Yes, in theory, one could use server logs to determine which IP addresses make which requests for what documents, but in practice... Making things run and spying on people tend to be two different departments. With HTML, unless you block all javascript and have no images load, tracking javascript and tracking pixels will be invoked by your browser and those DO go to the tracking you department. If you hit a webpage it is FAR more likely that data goes somewhere for you to be spied on than just downloading an RSS feed (although individual items in the RSS feed may well have tracking pixels).