Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Any way to anonymize Podcast downloads? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi there! I like to listen to the "Slightly something else" podcast. Although it is gaming-related, they have these ad-segments that have some kind of targetting, as it is always in the language from where I've downloaded the episone.

Yesterday I was really surprised that the ad seemed very well targeted, because it has been referencing a very specific topic concerning my flatmates and me that doesn't have anything to do with gaming.

My first theory was that my IP was correlated with search terms my partner googled in my home IP (I search with searxng). But then I realized that I've subscribed to another podcast related to the advertised topic. (also: the episode with the advertisements was downloaded via mobile network)

So... Apparently, spotify (where slightly something else is hosted via anchor.fm) analyzes the podcasts I subscribe to via rss feed. Is there any way how I can avoid being profiled? Is this the reason why I'd start using a commercial VPN?

Edit: I'd like to reply to your comments, but my lemmy instance won't display them correctly. So I'll try to answer here: I'm already using Antennapod with rss feeds for download. That's why I was so suprised and pissed that the ad was so obviously targeted.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The main reason people are distributing podcasts via youtube or spotify and not via RSS is because podcast RSS (podcasting 1.0) gives limited visibility into audience or whether anyone even cares.

Podcasting 2.0 is trying to build a standard that still uses RSS but provides the info podcast creators need to understand their audience. Basically, what can we do to keep people from relying on closed-source solutions and go back to RSS as the main driver of distribution. Its not intended to be used for targeting and mostly just provides download counts and such (which rss doesnt)