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What Makes Torrenting Unsecure and How to Cope Up with it?
Although there is a fine line between legal and illegal in torrenting, most users fail to distinguish between them. A general practice called ISP throttling is used to control such activities. ISP throttling is when your ISP purposefully pulls down your connection or does not load certain pages to impede traffic. The ISP, as well as other online intruders, are always on the search for such activities.
The most popular BitTorrent trackers are KickassTorrents, or PirateBay, which are called to function in a moderately legally grey place. While the sites are only just trackers, they host a lot of violating or copyrighted content and give users free access to it.
The downloading and transferring of such content is thought to be illegal in many countries and can be unsafe for users. KickassTorrents has been called to host malware on certain events. Moreover, we’ve seen that PirateBay was pulled down due to legality problems - therefore, we recommend you stay protected by connecting to a VPN online.
It is very convenient to blame the users who are sharing and accessing copyrighted content. As mentioned, users connected to the same tracker, called peers, can then be broken into two categories: leeches, those who are downloading through a magnet file, and seeds, those who previously have the magnet file downloaded.
Legally, seeding or leeching copyrighted content is an obvious violation of copyright laws. The trackers are just the gateway. In the end, they always have a point to blame the user.
What if you got caught?
The possibilities of you serving time or visiting court due to a Torrenting problem are less, but there can be extreme outcomes. Lately, copyright thieves were charged for high amounts of money, and most had even visited the court.
Copyright holders use certain ways to dissuade people from copyright violations. Out of which Copyright trolls, and DMCA are in full action these days.
Why do you require a VPN?
As stated before, Torrenting without a VPN means your activity online is visible to almost everyone who has access to it, like your ISP. In many countries, the Internet Service Provider can share your information with third parties, which could also have intellectual property holders.
We recommend that you connect to a VPN to prevent your ISP from accessing your data or activity online. Further, if you unintentionally download such content, a VPN will lessen your chances of being caught and secure you from the legal outcome which would otherwise be in place and affect you.
Bottomline
Since copyright trolls track down users through their IP addresses, they will not be able to do so when connected to a VPN proxy because a VPN will hide your IP address and give you a temporary IP that cannot be tracked down or traced. Hiding the IP means that your identity, location, and all your data, remain private and safe while you’re browsing on the internet.