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Dear Lifehacker,
I've done lots of research about my Internet Service Provider's relationship with my uTorrent activity, but I still don't feel entirely confident in my knowledge about what they see. What does my ISP see when I'm torrenting? What if I'm encrypted, or under a VPN? Many of your articles talk about how to stay safe/secure/private, but don't always go completely behind the scenes. Can you help clear this up?
BitTorrent is client which allows you to download torrent files. While BTGuard allows you to download torrents anonymously, it still leaves your Internet traffic exposed an not encrypted when you are surfing the web. The third and most reliable choice is using VPN to download torrents anonymously. VPN stands for virtual private network, securely encrypts all of your Internet traffic.
Baffled by BitTorrent
Image remixed from an original by Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock.
Dear Baffled,
You're right; we've written a lot of articles about how to protect yourself over the years, but sometimes it can be confusing as to exactly what's happening behind the scenes. And while it's difficult to know, since every ISP is different, you generally have two different entities to worry about: your ISP, and the media companies looking to quash illegal downloading. Here's what each of them monitors for and how you can keep yourself anonymous.
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Your ISP Sees That You're Using BitTorrent, and Might Throttle Your Connection
In general, ISPs these days aren't so interested in what you're downloading. They leave that to the folks being stolen from. Instead, ISPs are more concerned with how much bandwidth you're sucking up, and whether that's slowing everyone else down. As such, many ISPs will throttle your connection—that is, slow it down—if they see you're using BitTorrent. They don't usually look at what you're downloading (even though they could, if they wanted to), but they will check what kind of traffic is coming from your machine. That is, they'll see how much of it is email, web browsing, video chat, online gaming, and so on. If they see any BitTorrent traffic, they'll slow it down—it doesn't matter whether you're downloading a legal Linux ISO or Batman Begins. All they care about is that you're slowing down their network.
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To see if your ISP is looking for BitTorrent traffic, check out this list of the worst offenders, or try the previously mentionedGlasnost tool. If your ISP isn't throttling BitTorrent, then you don't have much to worry about, though they still could see anything they wanted.
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Read more ReadThe Media Companies Sees What You're Downloading (and Will Tell Your ISP)
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The real problem, if you're downloading illegal media, is the company from whom you're stealing. They (or lawyers or companies on their behalf) actually go online and seek out torrents of their material, whether it be movies, music, TV shows, or anything else, and will download the torrent themselves. From there, they can see a lot of information about the other users connected—including their IP address. You can even check this for yourself at home. Start downloading a torrent and click on the 'More Info' section of your torrent client. You'll see the IP address of everyone you're downloading from and uploading to, plain as day.
Once they find your IP address (which they can do just by clicking 'more info' in their torrent client), they'll find out who your ISP is and send them a letter. Your ISP then, in turn, will forward you a notice that you've been caught pirating media. Usually the first offense is just a proverbial slap on the wrist, though if you're a repeat offender it could mean having your internet service terminated. If you're very unlucky it could even mean paying a lot of money in a settlement.
So What Should You Do to Stay Anonymous?
It's a dark time for BitTorrent. A lot of the old methods aren't very useful anymore. Applications like PeerBlock claim to block the MPAA and RIAA from connecting to you, but they're not very reliable, and you can still easily get caught when using PeerBlock. Similarly, while your BitTorrent client's encryption can be helpful against throttling, it doesn't always protect you, since some ISPs use more powerful methods of seeing what you're downloading that can get past basic BitTorrent encryption.
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These days, the only way to truly keep your downloading anonymous is to take more drastic measures. If you're worried about getting caught downloading illegal materials, use a proxy like BTGuard. It funnels all your BitTorrent traffic through another server, thus keeping your IP address hidden from anyone connecting to your BitTorrent swarm. Even if you're downloading a torrent that's being tracked, they'll see BTGuard's IP, not yours, and BTGuard doesn't keep any logs of their service, meaning they won't trace that IP address back to you.
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Read more ReadIf you want to keep your traffic from being throttled, you can try enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. if this doesn't work, BTGuard provides an encryption program along with its proxy service that can hide your traffic better than uTorrent and other clients, to ensure you don't get throttled.
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Read more ReadDear Lifehacker,
I've read that my ISP keeps logs of my activity and I'm concerned that private data is being saved on their servers. How concerned should I be, and how can I ensure they don't see everything I do?
Sincerely,
Paranoid Browser
Dear PB,
According to the TorrentFreak article you mentioned, you can already get an idea of what is and isn't logged. Here's a quick summary of who retains what and for how long:
- Comcast - They're believed to retain IP addresses that've used BitTorrent for 180 days, but they haven't officially commented on the matter
- Verizon - Information about IP address assignments is retained for 18 months.
- Qwest/Century - IP address logs are kept for approximately one year.
- Cox - Believed to keep logs for up to six months.
- Charter - Believed to keep logs for up to one year.
This is just a short list of IP logging practices and is far from complete. If you really want to find out how long your ISP retains logs of your activity, you'll want to give them a call and ask. From the looks of it, some ISPs are very forthcoming with this information and others are not. If you want to protect yourself and come close to ensuring your ISP doesn't really know what you're doing online, you'll have to anonymize your activity.
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A lot of people probably assume that if you're browsing anonymously it's because you're doing something illegal, but there's plenty of content on the web you may not want to risk letting out in the open. Not only is it possible that it'll be logged by your ISP, but with free-flowing data your activity is potentially open to anyone on your network. In the past, we've seen how easily Firesheep can sniff out usernames and passwords on public Wi-Fi and that's just one example. Protecting your activity is not just important because you want to avoid any tracking your ISP may employ, but more so because your private data can be compromised if you're not careful. While it's unlikely a hacker is going to steal your Facebook credentials—or anything else—while you're signing in at Starbucks to update your status, when easily-preventable bad things happen you're not going to be comforted by statistics.
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Read more ReadBrowse Securely With HTTPS
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First things first, you should be using HTTPS. If a site offers HTTPS, just go to https://www.thewebsite.com instead of just plain old http. If you want to make things even easier, you can just install the Firefox and Chrome extension HTTPS Everywhere and it'll take care of the problem for you.
Why Should I Care About HTTPS on Facebook (or Other Web Sites)?
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Read more ReadBrowse Anonymously With Tor
HTTPS just encrypts data as its transfered, but it doesn't completely anonymize your activity. That's where Tor comes in. Tor was designed to help you browse the web without leaving a trace, as it funnels your traffic through a series of virtual tunnels. Tor offers a great, detailed overview of how it works and what it's used for, but here's the part you'll want to know (if you don't already):
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organizations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.
Individuals use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and their family members, or to connect to news sites, instant messaging services, or the like when these are blocked by their local Internet providers. Tor's hidden services let users publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Individuals also use Tor for socially sensitive communication: chat rooms and web forums for rape and abuse survivors, or people with illnesses.
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To get started with Tor, just follow these steps:
- Download the browser bundle and unpack the zip file.
- Open up the TorBrowser application.
- Wait for the Vidalia application to connect you to the Tor network.
- Once you've connected, a special version of Firefox will open and it will be called TorBrowser. It will provide you with a protected IP address (which should not be your actual IP address). You can browse anonymously within that browser.
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Just using Tor is not enough to keep you truly anonymous. You need to avoid installing/using browser plug-ins, always use HTTPS (as recommended above), and do not open any documents you download while connected to Tor (or while online, for that matter). Tor also suggests that you use a bridge relay if you don't want anyone on your network to find out that you're using Tor, but that may or may not be a concern in your particular case. If you use Tor and heed these precautions, you shouldn't have to worry too much about anyone tracking your activity.
If Tor's not your thing, you have a few other options. Reader Briareos suggests using an off-shore VPN service that doesn't log your access, like BolehVPN. I'm always a little wary of trusting a company with privacy concerns, but in this specific case I'm probably being a little overly-paranoid. Reader Trolls4Breakfast suggests Cocoon, which is another option in the form of a browser extension for Firefox, Internet Explorer, or your iPhone/iPad.
But what if you're just somewhat paranoid about specific activities? If you're a BitTorrent user you can anonymize your traffic with BTGuard. If you just want to have a private chat, you can download TorChat.
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Ultimately, your ISP is going to have some idea of your online activity no matter what you do, but with these methods you'll be anonymous enough to avoid any problems. Happy anonymous browsing!
Love,
Lifehacker
Photo by erwinova (Shutterstock).
How To Download Torrent Files And Block Isp From Seeing My Facebook
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