Does RSS avoid tracking?
Perhaps this is a dumb question but I was thinking about this recently in light of increased privacy concerns.
Does receiving RSS feeds (via for example Liferea) avoid one being tracked online? My thinking is that via RSS you only visit the site once to subscribe to the feed and then it is the site who is sending you the feed. Or is one being tracked by simply receiving new feeds. Just a thought ...
Thanks.
Your feed reader periodically gets the feed, the site knows when.
"Subscription" is what you do in your reader, it has no meaning
server-side. Feed articles can also use standard techniques like remote
images for tracking.
I am a member!
If you're being tracked, it's by the sites you visit as a esult of following links in your feeds. If, instead of using a local client, you use something like Google Reader, That could track you, nd I'm not sure how you'd know for sure.
I haven't been able to find an option in Liferea to block images the way e-mail clients do; images can be used to find out when you saw the post in your feed reader. Does anyone know of such an option in Liferea? One possible solution is to disconnect from the Internet when you check the feed reader, though this method is a bit cumbersome. Then sites would only be able to track your feed reader updates.
Thanks for the clarification.