I prefer the email style myself, tho thru a specialised reader. Mostly. T’bird for the few feeds I read at work.

The part I would disagree with is the claim of anonymity. That’s pretty much not true. Tho “it depends” as well.

Why?

Well it revolves around the principle fact that a user likes what you have to offer on a site such that they feel it worthwhile to want to see updates on a regular basis.
So this means that someone who subscribes to a feed has left tracks on the site already.

Now feeds are typically updated automatically, and usually on a regular, like clockwork basis.
I recall reading one article a few years ago about a CNN or Cnet or one of the larger news sites saying that while RSS was great for driving additional traffic the *huge* spike on the hour every hour as a whole bunch of readers all updated simultaneously caused major, unforseen, troubles for their early infrastructure.

So this regularity can be a large clue. As can the client (think agent). And the clients IP Address. Despite the posibility of dynamic IP addresses. Most non-dialup users tend to be pretty static.

Now armed with all the above and some knowledge of regex’s and the ability to slice and dice logs you can find a *LOT* about a person.

If you yourself have access to the raw logs for your blog, you should be able to:

* find my ip address, possibly already attached to this comment. Date/time stamps help otherwise. You can even estimate my typing speed.

* Given that, you should be able to discover my country (easy) & City: harder.

* Going at it differently, you should be able to extract my full name. At least one of my email addresses, probably more.
* You should be able to find my personal web site and because it’s more for family & friend: photos of myself etc.
* Armed with that, you should be able to identify a lot of what I’ve been doing in previous years, where I currently work and possibly even my previous employers.

I could go on, but I suspect you get the idea.

The other part, is that you can go back and track thru your own logs and see where a person went and what they did. That can, in and of itself, expose a great deal about a person.
Tho this depends on what the site is for and what it serves up or how.
Think: if you’re an ecommerce style site, they may have bought something. You can now tie a feed-reader to a name and physical address.

No you are not anonymous. Additionally writing as someone who has done several forensic investigations: You may have the illusion of being anonymous but do not truely have it.

It’s actually extremely difficult, legally, to be truely anonymous on the Internet.

Steve