It's a little worse than email.

With email, you normally use unique image and link URLs for each recipient, so you generally know who's opened the email and what they've clicked and can map that to their email address and whatever other information you have about them.

With RSS, you generally don't have any information about who's accessing the feed other than an IP address. It is possible to require users to log in and receive a unique RSS URL, which is what podcasts often do to give paid subscribers access to paywalled episodes, but that's not common for web RSS.

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Gormo 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The exact same techniques used for email can be used for RSS. You could generate unique links for RSS too, based on requester headers, in the same way way web fingerprinting works. There'd be a bit of computational overheard in comparison to serving a static XML file, but it seems easily doable.

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pests 4 days ago | parent [-]

Small problem was the way feeds worked in practice is you had various services caching the source feed and consolidating everything for its users like Reader and Feedly and others. Multiple startups around this.

Even the injected ads idea was tried with companies like FeedBurner, later acquired by google.

	▲	Gormo 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not that much different from any other form of content aggregation. Web links posted to HN or Reddit also either strip out individualized links or conflate everything together under the same link. There are plenty of solutions to this. If you're generating feeds on the fly with tracking metadata based on the requester, you can identify aggregators, and treat them equivalently to social media platforms where users circulate normal web links. You still get click-throughs to the underlying content from the end users, and you'll know the aggregator was the referrer. Many podcasts use direct ad injection using metadata from the request to the enclosure link -- that seems to work well enough, and seems like the sort of thing that could be used for other content than just audio and video.

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DamonHD 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I really really really object to being tracked in emails with poisoned links (without being told or having a sensible opt-out, usually, so also illegal under GDPR I believe) and it is one reason that I will not sign up to them.