Rachel Kroll
With all of this feed reader stuff going on, I've learned a few more things about goings-on in this space. Some of it is just strange.
During the early development stage of this project, I installed a couple of apps from the Mac app store on my machine to do some testing. Each one of them was given a unique URL so I could tell them apart. This meant I started seeing traffic from my laptop to the test server, which is exactly how it was supposed to work.
But, one of those unique URLs started getting requests from some random "cloud" service. There was no indication this would happen when I plugged it into the app. It just appeared, and it was running in parallel with the requests from my actual laptop. In fact, I've since stopped running all of those programs, and they're *still* polling it - just under every three hours, and always unconditionally. Great. I bet it'll keep going approximately forever.
Nothing on the app's web page suggests this will happen. It just does. If anything, the "all articles are available offline and without an internet connection" blurb on their web page suggests the opposite: the laptop does a fetch and keeps it locally. What a concept!
So, if you were thinking about using that particular app to read some feed containing something relatively private, guess what, they're reading it too.