In that RSS feed are URLs of audio files and the podacast player at some point if you are subscribed in your podcast app, at some point the podcast app downloads that audio file that is listed in the RSS feed for the episode that you are going to listen to. The podcast industry, I wrote about this in the post, the fundamental behavior of a podcast player is that no publisher can break without cutting off a large portion of their audience is that they publish an RSS feed. I think feed burner even offered them to the masses but there has been various feed hosting and analytics platforms and packages that have offered tracking pixels for a while. Well you know I follow the podcast industry news and tracking pixels have been a thing in RSS feeds for a long time. I'm not saying it's unreasonable from a technological perspective but I had no idea that was a thing. I had no idea that this was a thing in the show notes for podcasts. I have heard of tracking pixels and I've seen it used plenty of times on the web. So it's kind of a backdoor to getting a little bit of information about users without their consent. So one of the things you mention in your blog post is tracking pixels effectively invisible but when Overcast or some other client goes to get that image to display in show notes for example that inherently passes some information about that user to the server that is serving that image.
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