Question About Content Authenticity Assumptions in Podcasting 2.0 #738
Replies: 3 comments 3 replies
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Implicit trust. |
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I suspect you'd need to highlight what, particularly, you want "trust" for. Right now, I'm unaware of any specific trust added by additional Podcasting 2.0 features. ("Podcasting 2.0" is just a set of additional RSS tags, built to go in a standard RSS 2.0 feed, so by design, there's not anything that would break things.) Fundamentally, once you've found an RSS feed, then elements of content integrity ("Is this really the audio without any edits") or provenance ("is this really Diary of a CEO, or is this a copy with crappy ads dropped in") are irrelevant. The source of truth is the RSS feed, after all. The way Google Podcasts attempted to fix this was to require the link from the RSS feed to a website to be linked back, using a LINK REL. So, if the podcast feed you just found was purporting to be Diary of a CEO, then it would link to the Diary of a CEO website, and that would have a LINK REL back to the podcast feed. This failed. Partially it failed because it's not trivial to add a LINK REL to some websites, especially if they're just a Substack or a Facebook page. Partially, it failed because there's no trust that the Diary of a CEO website is actually the Diary of a CEO website, so all that's really being trusted here is a link to somewhere else on the internet, rather than any actual guarantee that it's from someone particularly. And, partially it failed because a surprising number of podcasts don't have websites of their own. I'm liking the idea of fixing that somehow - especially in a world where there are plenty of copies of the big podcasts, with programmatic ads added on. Ideas would be welcome. |
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Thanks for the thoughtful replies - they helped clarify the design boundaries quite a bit. Following this discussion, I wrote a short article that tries to frame podcasting through a supply-chain lens, focusing on trust assumptions rather than vulnerabilities or proposals: Podcasts as a Supply Chain: A Missing Security Model : https://kfir-g.dev/blog/blogs/2025-12-30_podcasts-as-a-supply-chain-missing-security-model/ For context: I come from a security engineering background and have worked on supply-chain related systems. I’m also a heavy podcast listener, which is what motivated me to look at podcast RSS this way. The article isn’t a critique of Podcasting 2.0 or RSS, and it doesn’t suggest changes. It’s mainly an attempt to document the implicit trust model and make the assumptions explicit, especially given scale, duplication, ads, and monetization. Sharing in case it’s useful for context happy to hear thoughts. |
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Hi,
I’m trying to better understand the trust assumptions behind Podcasting 2.0 and the podcast namespace.
Specifically, I’m curious whether there are any mechanisms - current or planned - that address content integrity or provenance at the feed or episode level, or whether the ecosystem intentionally relies on the same implicit trust model as traditional RSS.
This is not about identifying issues or proposing changes, but simply about understanding the design boundaries and what is considered in-scope versus out-of-scope for the protocol.
Thanks in advance - I’m looking for clarity on the design assumptions rather than implementation details
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