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Most Torrent Downloaders Are Monitored, Study Finds
derekmead writes "A new study from Birmingham University in the U.K. found that people will likely be monitored within hours of downloading popular torrents by at least one of ten or more major monitoring firms. The team, led by security researcher Tom Chothia, ran software that acted like a BitTorrent client for three years and recorded all of the connections made to it. At SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy this week, the team announced that they found huge monitoring operations tracking downloaders that have been up and running for at least the entirety of their research. According to the team's presentation (PDF), monitors were only regularly detected in Top 100 torrents, while monitoring of more obscure material was more spotty. What's really mysterious is who all of the firms are. Chothia's crew found around 10 different monitoring entities, of which a few were identifiable as security companies, copyright firms, or other torrent researchers. But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting. Now, despite firms focusing mostly on just the top few searches out there at any given time, that's still a massive amount of user data to collect and store. Why? Well, if a reverse class-action lawsuit were feasible, those treasure troves of stored data would be extremely valuable."
I would assume that most people are using VPNs these days, even for casual web surfing. I don't need my IP recorded by cnn.com and yahoo and youtube and google.
Most good VPNs don't keep logs, or delete logs within 24 hours.
It's definitely not news, but it's mindblowing how many people are totally indifferent to being tracked. Some of the logic I've heard is, "everyone's doing it, it's like speeding - not much of a chance of getting caught" or just complete indifference. Personally, there haven't really been any movies or music made in the past 15 years that are even worth downloading for free, I'll never understand why people bother wasting drive space.