Secure Feeds and Web-Based Aggregators

A recent situation involving Bloglines highlights the problem.  People don’t think when it comes to their personal information.  I’m sure the password is a birthday or their own name.  Think about this!  Make a request from your online banking service for a new password.  The response email gets sent to your Gmail account.  Ooops!  Someone catches the information via a persistent search in Bloglines, goes in, creates a recurring payment to some company, and your start bleeding money on a monthly basis.

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You may or may not catch that something is wrong.  If you do, great.  Chances are you may not. Danny Sullivan’s “Security and the End User” article hightlights the importance as well as what Bloglines has proposed.  The question still remains:  why would someone use a feed management/metrics service for there own personal, secure feeds?  What do they gain?  Do they understand the difference between an aggregator and a syndication management service?  Even if:

Bloglines actually provides HTTP authentication for secure feeds. When this method is used, Bloglines secures the feed so that it can not be searched on or subscribed to except by the owner of the feed.

It’s not 100% guarantee it gets release by accident.  No guarantee someone could not access my computer and look through my RSS reader for the info but more likely they would try to get user/pass from my browser first.  The community needs to keep thinking about how best to handle from a technical standpoint (aggregator, management services, etc.).  For now, continue to educate the new RSS user before they create a situation that turns them off from RSS.

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Added on: December 13, 2006 with feedback from 0 folks
Tagged as: bloglines , feedburner , feed management , rss , secure feed , seo , web-based aggregators ,
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