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Bloglines has this feature where you can subscribe to RSS feeds and set it to private. You could presumably use this to subscribe to feeds intended only for yourself, and no one would know about the feed. But I’ve seen the contents of those ‘private’ feeds show up in the Bloglines search results. I’m subscribed to some keyword searches in Bloglines, and have seen some interesting search results:

• RSS feeds for referrals picked up by the Mint stats program
• An RSS feed with items from someone’s POP3 account. When I looked at the feed URL, it showed the POP3 server, username, and password all in plain text.
• An RSS feed with items from someone’s Yahoo mail inbox. There was a username and password in the feed URL but it was encrypted.

You can tell that they’re meant to be private feeds because there’s usually only one subscriber to the feed and when you try to find out who subscribed to it, it says “There Are No Subscribers To This Feed With Public Profiles”.

A couple of months ago I created this custom feed using Feedshake, and added it into my Bloglines subscriptions. I set the feed to private because I wasn’t sure I’d be using Feedshake yet. A week later I noticed someone else had subscribed to the feed, but they had set it to private too so I couldn’t tell who it was. He/she must have found it through a search!

So … don’t add private feeds into Bloglines.