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I'm honestly not sure what sort of tracking occurs with podcasts or if tracking and podcast ads go hand-in-hand. There must be some degree of audience analytics, I guess.

Generally, I am not sure that no-ads means no-tracking, either. Though, that could certainly be a selling point to paying for a service of any kind.

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I run Pi-hole on my home network. Its default blocklists has prevented several podcasts in my partner's Podcasts app from playing. I've had to explicitly allow a couple of distinct third-party trackers/analytics services for them to play.

It was news to me that what I thought was a simple audio file also came with a bunch of analytics/tracking. I previously thought analytics were limited to simple events (play, pause, subscribe, finish, etc.) collected on Apple's side, but apparently not.

That's interesting. Perhaps using a trusted third party podcast app would be preferable? Again, not sure. I certainly understand having some analytics around non-identifiable data, such as downloads, listens, etc.

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