BitTorrent Inc. and User Privacy

[Atreides]

BitTorrent has presented itself as a forefighter of user privacy, announcing its commitment to keeping people safe from the law enforcements agencies. However, this is only true to some of the newer products of the company, while its flagship apps are a privacy nightmare by design. In addition, the fact that the company refuses to advertise VPN services to their users demonstrates that privacy isn’t always high on the BitTorrent’s agenda.
 

BitTorrent Inc. suddenly surprised everyone with a brilliant marketing campaign: it put up shocking billboards in 3 major metropolitan areas. One of the billboards read the spooky message “Your Data Should Belong to the NSAâ€, but in a few days it was updated, striking “The NSA†while adding “Youâ€. The company explained they wanted to wake the public up, alerting them to the fact that people do have the power to take action over the recent gross rights violations.

According to the company, privacy is one of the core values of the service and a means to get away from the surveillance. However, these words can hardly apply to all BitTorrent products. Indeed, regular BitTorrent transfers through uTorrent or other apps lack any form of privacy. As a result, users, sharing files in public, display their IP-addresses to everyone and are tracked by dozens of monitoring entities.

Industry experts have to admit that BitTorrent’s messaging is confusing – while the company released a great Sync app earlier in 2013, allowing users to run a private and secure backup service, the general public still associates BitTorrent with public downloads. However, the billboard campaign and media commentary of BitTorrent didn’t mention this distinction, which is misleading – at least because over 250,000 torrent users have been sued in the United States alone because it’s so easy to monitor file-sharers.

In addition, BitTorrent refused to accept ads from a firm which wanted to offer people a bit more privacy – TorGuard, because it considered VPN-service to be “high riskâ€. It looked like a rather odd stance for a business which claims to have privacy as one of its core values. Unfortunately, BitTorrent’s privacy principle is only applied selectively.