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?
Somebody would have to actively watch you. And properly setup it would still be more private.
You follow a bunch of political sites. Your FBI agent sees your computer connect to the sites. With regular browser he sees each site and how much time you spend there, which articles you pull.
With RSS set to once a day, your computer pulls all the text from all the political sites. No data on which articles you view.
It’s the equivalent of getting several newspapers/magazines by subscription vs ordering specific issues.
The downside is that it probably is a great fingerprint if you go through vpn or tor. But it also could limit your tor/vpn connection time to the shortest time possible.
What do you mean? How is it any less private than on the clearnet?
Adversary just has to look for somebody who requests the exact same news sources.
RSS in theory would be fucking perfect for tor. But all the best development for it occurred before tor got great.
For privacy have a client download from random news sources on the list. Then a new circuit and download another random amount. That would be a perfect way to receive news.
You raise a good point. I think that if an RSS reader could pull from different websites at separate times and either programmatically use the TOR browser /at elast have support for stream isolation along with randomly scheduling when to pull from what website, it should be able to evade most automated measures of surveillance. Timing and correlation attacks are the only ones I can think of other than NSA paying for over 50% if TOR nodes.