That would be a poor assumption. How can it distinguish a single user's reader from a shared service like NewsBlur, which will request a feed on behalf of hundreds of users? The server knows that some aggregator is pulling its feed, but it has no way to tie that to a user.

There are other ways, though: images in the feed that call back to the server, for example.

True, but it is quite possible that is you yourself.

If you selfhost your reader, you control the logs. If you use a reader, the server admin might now what feeds you have. But the server who hosts the feed (the blog) has no idea, tracking doesn't work easily - that is still an improvement.

I think he means the server hosting the RSS feed and not the server hosting your RSS tool (like the late Google Reader).

In that case, the server hosting the feed does now nothing about you as soon as you are not the sole user on a server hosting a feed (I sure wasn't sure how to interpret that, so I tried to cover both cases)

The server would know your IP address, and most likely your user agent and referrer by looking at their weberver log though, right?

cf. eg. : https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes

Which server exactly? If you use a feedreader, it is not you or your browser that fetches the page, it is the feedreader itself. So a site only knows that their feed was fetched once from a feedreader, not who or how manye people read that feed.

Note "feeds" is plural. There's no way for a server admin to get a list of other sites you subscribe to, unlike a centralized app like Google Reader.

Yep, that's a fair point.