RSS never tracked you

@Daojoan May I use that quote in a talk?

@creatures@plush.city @Daojoan@mastodon.social fetching an online resource means sending a request for it

@creatures@plush.city @Daojoan@mastodon.social I guess? either way, by simply requesting a resource, they will have your IP address.

simply being subscribed to an RSS feed is already really good data for an ad agency, since it can correlate that IP address with some categories. So if for example you're subscribed to the rebble RSS feed, and google somehow gets access to that info (for example if they were to use google servers for the RSS service, or if they embed an image that is hosted on google servers), then you're more likely to see ads for smart watches on your home network. The RSS server will also over time be able to guess your awake hours based on when your RSS reader checks for new articles (If it automatically refreshes, e.g. hourly) and probably more that I'm not thinking of rn

@creatures@plush.city @Daojoan@mastodon.social the topic of seeing ads in the first place is a different one

@creatures@plush.city @Daojoan@mastodon.social …yes, that's the point

@creatures@plush.city @Daojoan@mastodon.social tracking agencies are deceptively good at finding patterns in the noise

@scottwhat @Daojoan what if someone made alternative? like also newsfeeds but just in other format

@sorenladegaard @Daojoan mostly one - wikipedia article of day 🤪

@forst @Daojoan I use two solutions for this more and more:

1. Some readers like NetNewsWire have a builtin readability mode. They take the URL of the RSS entry, run it through reader mode and present it as if it were the RSS entry itself. Works fantastic even on feeds that only push a URL and no text at all.
2. I coded a read-it-later service for myself that extracts entries and pushes them to a feed I subscribe to, it’s here: https://github.com/thefranke/rss-librarian

@creatures@plush.city @_r @Daojoan

Some sites include essentially an entire web page in the item content, and depending on your reader images and such will be fetched, including any tracking codes.

OTOH I am unaware of rss readers handling cookies, so that stops some tracking.

@creatures@plush.city @_r @Daojoan

I have an otherwise great rss reader that fetches images. Mixed blessing.

@thefranke @Daojoan Didn't know about (1), that's brilliant, thanks!

I made some custom RSS exporters for myself as well for sites that don't have a feed

@Daojoan rss can be injected tracking and so can emails (e.g. via a tracking image). outlook and gmail are really hostile to self-hosted email services. blogs can have ads and other anti-features.
at the very end, you don't really own domains and IPs; big companies rent them to you.

what matters is never what kind of tech you use, but rather how you use it and why.

@forst @Daojoan On Android FeedMe does the same, you can even set it as a default for selected feeds in your subscriptions. Some of them are also quite good a circumventing paywalls

@forst @Daojoan are those extractors custom? Or do you contribute those to RSS-Bridge or similar projects?

@thefranke @Daojoan I use NetNewsWire, and it also allows this per-feed, as it turned out. Immediately enabled on the offenders.

@thefranke @Daojoan A custom Python thing, I write in what I'm familiar with. But I'm open to porting it if it can benefit more people

@Daojoan https://basilisk.gallery/@dave/114562977927631510

@forst @Daojoan Are you familiar with this project? https://rss-bridge.org

Basically a PHP framework where you can easily write bridges that scrape a webpage and turn them into a feed, caching and everything else is already managed by the framework.

@thefranke @Daojoan Wasn't familiar with it until now, thank you for sharing!
Don't know how interested they would be in a plugin for a very local website, but could be a fun little project