Google Reader Team — Please Implement Authenticated RSS

More and more these days I attempt to con­fig­ure some of my “pri­vate” feeds and I get prompted for a user­name and pass­word.   The rea­son behind this is that ser­vices want you to be authen­ti­cated to see this data.   They are pro­tect­ing pri­vacy at the cost of func­tion­al­ity.   I don’t dis­agree with this, and I think more ser­vices should hon­estly do this.  The prob­lem is when you add it to your RSS reader you can’t do any­thing with it.   I’ll rephrase, if you put it into a RSS client, the client has to sup­port authen­ti­cated RSS.

Google Reader, which is my RSS reader of choice.  Google Reader does not have a method for using authen­ti­cated RSS.  Please Google Reader Team, can we get this func­tion­al­ity?  One thing I would sug­gest though if you man­age to ful­fill this wish from me — dis­able shar­ing and email­ing on these feeds.   The feeds are authen­ti­cated for a rea­son, by mak­ing users take a bit more effort by using copy and paste — this would help alot to imple­ment data leak­age.   Plus Google, think of all the infor­ma­tion you could gather that you would nor­mally be authen­ti­cated to get — it’s trade from me to you.

February 25, 2009 | Creeva | View Comments
  • Ryan
    Dear Google Reader team, please don't implement authenticated feeds. We don't want you spidering our content. Despite creeva's offer to sneak you in, your advertisers have no right to get to our users. Why yes, we do know about robots.txt, but that's why we will keep our content on our site under its protection, thanks.

    Much Love,

    The people who put passwords up to keep their feeds from being indexed.
  • Wouldn't you need to give reader (or more appropriately someone you trust that might use google reader) your password in the first place? There are a few places where I have created content and would like to get it out, but I can't due to the RSS feed being password protected.

    If google reader allowed you to enter in a username and password, it wouldn't necessarily allow google to spider your content unless someone broke your ring of trust and put in there.

    It's ok for other third party to aggregators that do support it, then strip out the feed and republish it to google reader, but it's not ok for google reader to do this directly?

    If I have a username and password to get at your content in one manner, I can repurpose it to roogle reader anytime I want - I'm just trying to save myself a couple interim steps - thank you for stopping by.

    Much love,

    The author and one of the people that just wants his own content to be to use how he likes.
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