Jared Breland reports that Firefox 2 may be (un?)intentionally sending your RSS and Atom feed subscriptions to Google, thanks to a quirk in favicon retrieval. He goes into detail about the hows and whys this may be happening, but here’s the ultimate result:

… Google knows your browser version, the page you were visiting, the time you visited, and your IP address for correlation. Now let’s examine the cookie. Notice that it’s a root domain cookie (.google.com) and not something separate for fusion.google.com. Notice also that it doesn’t expire until 2038. Assuming you accept the cookie, which almost everyone will (explained below), Google can also correlate your feed views with all other Google services through the .google.com cookie. I cannot think of any technical need for this, either.

Jared does well to point out all the other things Google already knows. (A very big-brotherly list, I might add.) There is probably not a conspiracy here, but the very fact this issue is raised is a very healthy one for everyone involved.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 17:29 and is filed under syndication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.