Private posts are supposed to be viewable by you, so wouldn't it make sense that it is viewable by you?

As to seeing it after logging out, I can't imagine that's a cookie thing because logging out (to the best of my knowledge) sheds the cookie. I'm guessing that it is really due to the same session being active, but I honestly don't understand sessions or know for sure how access through the feed knows if it is you or not out there. Wait what I mean is the cookie is the only way it could have known it was you out there, but after logging out the session still considered you as "good to go" on private content.

Anyway I'm pretty sure "private means only me" works as expected. How about a link to a recent private post of yours and I'll see if I can see if via browser or feed reader. If not then no problem yah?

It does appear to work as it is supposed to (which is good of course) it's just that testing it on my own machine seemed that private posts were still viewable even when 'technically' I shouldn't have been able to. It wasn't until I testing it on a separate machine (turned out to be my wife's laptop that I had just re-installed windows on after a hard drive failure), that all came to light. I was initially worried as I knew the feeds were kind of separate to the blog and thought that readers would pick it up.

Like you I thought how can I be 'good to go' when I have logged out? what if several people use the same machine?,

Anyway all is good and glad it is working as it should.

Just to satisfy all curiosity, here is a permalink to the test post mentioned.
REMOVED
post-is-private

Do a feed on this blog to see if it shows:
REMOVED

For me it shows as the first post (of two) ;)