Privacy

32120 readers

1042 users here now

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Prunebutt@feddit.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] imkali@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Listen to it through a different, open source app, like a Podcasting 2.0 app (for example podverse, heres a link to that podcast link)

[–] Prunebutt@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Already using Antennapod
Never heard of "Podcasting 2.0", but it seems sketchy, tbh.
The link you supplied uses the same anchor.fm (spotify) feed as the official one

[–] d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone 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)