Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Start using an open source program to get your podcasts, like antennaPod which is excellent.
If it continues to be a problem, then you can download your podcast over ToR for free.
Or you could use one of the privacy respecting VPNs like Mullvad. Well worth the $5 a month they charge
You can use yt-dlp to download entire channels. I've noticed that this can sometimes cut out the ad entirely. Other times I will get a targeted ad.
Anchor.fm is part of Spotify and most of the time you will receive some sort of targeted ad no matter if the app is open source or not.
What you are describing may be an instance of Cross-Device Ad Targeting.
Listen to it through a different, open source app, like a Podcasting 2.0 app (for example podverse, heres a link to that podcast link)
The main reason people are distributing podcasts via youtube or spotify and not via RSS is because podcast RSS (podcasting 1.0) gives limited visibility into audience or whether anyone even cares.
Podcasting 2.0 is trying to build a standard that still uses RSS but provides the info podcast creators need to understand their audience. Basically, what can we do to keep people from relying on closed-source solutions and go back to RSS as the main driver of distribution. Its not intended to be used for targeting and mostly just provides download counts and such (which rss doesnt)
Tor