I am starting to use a RSS feed (Akregator). I intend to use it to follow youtube channels, and try to learn what else it can do. What kind of privacy issues should I be aware of? Are there settings I can use to improve privacy? I use a vpn, is there something else I should do?
I suggest getting RSS feeds from your subscriptions from Invidious. This way you won’t directly connect to Google’s servers.
About the VPN, if you do it for privacy, it’s almost useless for Youtube and you trust your browsing history to the VPN provider.
Why is it useless for YouTube?
Well, not useless per se, if you don’t log in. But troublesome.
Title, quick summary and image URL are in the RSS/Atom file itself (a XML file), everything more is done by the app parsing the webpage. But i think there’s no problem with privacy.
The big advantage of RSS and Youtube is you do not have to login to follow you channels. Your only touching what you need and soyour footprint is a lot smaller. I just started using RSS for youtube a few months ago and like it much better.
Privacy from…?
The biggest issue would be YouTube fingerprinting my RSS browser. But I am trying to learn about privacy, so I don’t know anything.
I’d be pretty shocked if the ad networks that spy on all of us care about RSS. You’re going to look like a bot, noise they actively try to ignore. The relevant piece of data to them would be a clickthru to the website (which they would then probably care about attributing to RSS)
Check for protections for Youtube, RSS itself is privacy-friendly.
