Thanks. I can make that work, but do you know of anywhere where the work of consuming a feed and outputing to text?
I'm not aware of anything, you can search, but to me your use-case doesn't sound like something that would attract much dev interest.
Here is an example on OT.
It is not that I am disturbed by its presence per see, but how do they know? I though cross site scipting was blocked by browsers, and cookies were only sent to the domain that created them. It is not at all my particular area of expertise, and I would quite like to know how it is done.
I'm not sure about the technical details of facebook's tracking on third party sites; I never browse with it enabled, so don't particularly care how it works.
"Cross site scripting" specifically refers to the security vulnerability and most browsers allow third-party cookies - by default, browsers aren't nearly as restrictive as you suggest.
Visiting forums.civfanatics.com sets cookies for facebook.com,
www.facebook.com, google.com, and forums.civfanatics.com. Scripts run from civfanitics.com, facebook.com, facebook.net, googlesyndication.com, googleadservices.com, twitter.com, google-analytics.com and twing.com.
I generally recommend browsing with both cookies and scripts disallowed, and selectively whitelisting those you need. forums.civfanatics.com only needs cookies from forums.civfanatics.com and scripts from civfanatics.com. Operation is faster without downloading/running all the tracking/advertising junk.
If you need to whitelist any of google/facebook/twitter, it's best to have a specific browser install for each of them to avoid having them allowed in a browser where you visit other sites.