Protecting your privacy with a feed reader

Using a feed reader to stay up-to-date with websites, blogs, or social media is already a big step up for your privacy over browsing those platforms directly. As you're viewing website content in your feed reader, that website won't know how long you linger on a post, what you ignore, or what you find interesting. And because they don't know about that behavior, they can't sell it, use it to manipulate what you see, or use it to target you with ads.

But using a feed reader alone doesn't fully prevent websites from getting more creative to track you, and your feed reader should be doing more to prevent that from happening.

When you click a link, a lot can happen behind the scenes. Websites often attach little tags to their links to track where you came from and who you are. You've probably seen them without realizing it: long, ugly URLs with things like ?utm_source=newsletter tacked onto the end. Those tags exist purely to identify you and report back to whoever sent the link.

Your feed reader should quietly strip those tags out before you ever click. Some readers go a step further to ensure links use a secure connection or even route your clicks through an anonymizing service to stay completely off the radar. That way, the websites you go to may see that there was a click into their website, but they'd never know it was you.

When an image loads, it doesn't just appear on your screen. It also sends a little signal back to whoever hosts it. That's just how the web works. But some advertisers take advantage of this by embedding tiny invisible images (sometimes just a single dot, too small to see) specifically designed to track you. When your feed reader loads that image automatically, it fires a silent signal to the advertiser: this person, at this time, on this device, saw this content. You never knew it happened.

A feed reader that auto-plays videos embedded in a feed can leak much more information than an image. Whoever's hosting the video knows where your mouse hovers, how long you play it, what parts you skip, and more.

A privacy-respecting feed reader should hold off on loading any images and videos until you choose to. One tap to load images or videos if you want them. Otherwise, nothing gets out.

If you're using a feed reader hosted by a developer or a company, you're trusting them with everything you're doing in it. That's unavoidable. But what you read, when you read it, and how often is all personal information that can reveal your political views, your health concerns, your finances, and your interests. A good feed reader will keep this to itself and away from other companies eagerly waiting to use it to build a profile about you and target you with ads or worse.

If a company knows you read health articles every morning, financial news at lunch, and political commentary in the evening, they already know more about you than most of your friends do. That kind of insight is incredibly valuable to advertisers, data brokers, and anyone else looking to influence your decisions.

Your feed reader will inevitably have to collect and store data associated with you, like which articles you've read to sync them across all your devices. But not all that data needs to be kept indefinitely. Activity logs, error reports, and session data are temporary and no feed reader should be hanging onto them forever. A good rule of thumb is that a feed reader should only keep your data for as long as it genuinely needs it, and delete it immediately when it no longer does. Look for a feed reader that publishes its data retention policy so you can see for yourself what they keep and for how long.

A good reader shouldn't just say it'll prioritize protecting your privacy, but should demonstrate it. Signs your feed reader is serious about privacy:

• Has a plain-language privacy policy, one written in plain English and not a gobbledygook of legalese, so you actually know what you're agreeing to.
• Considers open sourcing the code. It's not always possible, but if a feed reader publishes its code openly, anyone can check and verify that the feed reader actually does what it claims.
• Demonstrates putting users before profits. If the company behind the reader offers insight into their business, including their financials and goals, that's a strong signal they take privacy seriously. And if it's set up as a nonprofit organization, that's even better. Nonprofits aren't in business to make money, which removes one of the biggest reasons companies end up misusing your data in the first place.

Your IP address can reveal your location and your identity. When you click a link in your feed reader and open the website, you're handing that website your IP address.

To prevent this, you can download and install a VPN that will hide your IP address as you're navigating to websites from inside your feed reader, making it much harder for sites to track your location and identity. We recommend Mullvad or ProtonVPN.

Just know that some websites may block or limit your access if they detect you're using a VPN, but switching your VPN app to a different location usually resolves it.

Using a Tor web browser will hide your IP address by routing your web browsing through multiple servers before it reaches its destination. If you set it as the default browser your feed reader opens links in, websites won't be able to trace clicks back to you. Some websites block Tor traffic, so you may occasionally need to have Tor Browser route you through a different path to get things working. We recommend Tor Browser or Onion Browser (iOS only). Brave browser has a built-in Tor feature, though it's considered less robust than the official Tor Browser.

Open RSS already does this, but there are other services that will sit between you and the websites you want to follow, giving you a feed of what those sites publish. That way, those websites will never see your real IP address or your reading habits. The good ones will also often strip tracking from links and block invasive media by default. Just remember that you're trusting that service with your online reading history, so check their privacy policy carefully beforehand.

If you're a techy or feeling ambitious enough to put in the time to manage it, you can run a self-hosted feed reader. It gives you full control over your data and nothing is stored on someone else's server. Remember that even self-hosted readers can still expose your IP address, location, and details about your identity to the websites whose feeds you subscribe to, though.

As long as you're navigating the internet, clicking through content, and using services built by other people, someone somewhere is going to have access to your data. That's just the nature of being online, and that's okay.

What's important is to minimize the data you share and make sure it's in the hands of people and companies you actually trust, whether that's your VPN provider, your feed reader, or the service hosting your feeds. The more deliberately you choose who you trust, the more control you have. And while no single feed reader will give you complete control, a well-designed, privacy-conscious one gets you pretty darn close.

Last Updated: 1 day ago