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?

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.

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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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