Hello,
reading about the topic I personally wondered about how people can use VPNs like ProtonVPN for torrenting which isn’t legal in some countries, without ProtonVPN and other providers getting in trouble.
Of course they don’t log and don’t have data about which user is accessing what so they can’t hand out data. But why don’t law enforcements force them to block specific traffic and thus hindering people from using it for pricacy?
Let me put it this way for an easy understanding, let’s suppose you are in Africa, and you are connected to a Russian VPN and you pirate an USA copyrighted stuff, do you believe someone will give a flying fuck about it?
In most jurisdictions, with a lot of hand waving, it comes down to would a reasonable and prudent person see a non-criminal use of this service?
So for VPN providers with no logging, would a reasonable and prudent person see a utility in that service? Yes. If you have a health matter. If you’re a whistleblower. If you’re sensitive about people knowing what porn you like. If you want to look up medical information without getting an associated with your identity. There’s a lot of non-criminal uses of the VPN
And how is a vpn protecting you from any of that? You know tracking by ip is not the ultimate form of tracking the con providers sell you on. There is cookies, list top 1000 sites and which ones you visited had an 80+% reliability for tracking and listing more sites increased it. And this is just the stuff we have found out about. Believing a VPN protects your privacy is stupid in this day. Sure if your worried about isp I guess but most sites are already encrypted. I guess it also prevents it being in the tracker for a torrent so if that is an issue in your country yes.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
A new browser, a new container in the browser, a new profile in the browser, can do quite a lot of good for you. If you use a privacy respecting browser like mullvad The fingerprint signature is become much harder to track. This is demonstrated by going to fingerprint.com when using a VPN and the mullvad browser.
The question wasn’t why VPNs are allowed but why VPNs don’t just have to block all torrent traffic by law. Your answer still applies tho: torrents aren’t used exclusively for piracy. They’re a good way for people to share files who don’t have the resources to pay for a server, especially since torrents scale automatically
They will just hide. Lots of trackers block port 6881 because ISPs blocked port 6881 and people couldn’t torrent, because it was the default torrent port.
So they just changed to random ports. Random is the default now in lots of clients.
Torrenting stuff that is public domain or intended by its creators to be shared via BitTorrent isn’t illegal. You won’t get busted for sharing a Linux ISO or a copy of Moby Dick.
You would get in trouble for media made in or after 1929 (currently). A VPN would help to protect you from being caught for this, but you would most likely never get arrested for downloading, only being a major player in a scene.
And why cops don’t stop them? They do. There’s laws on books that prohibit them, but in (a lot) of countries, they either don’t have a law that stops VPNs, only piracy sites, or simply don’t have the time to care about media piracy when there’s bigger fish to fry.
But why don’t law enforcements force them to block specific traffic and thus hindering people from using it for pricacy?
What traffic? They have forced Mullvad and IVPN to stop offering port forwarding and deleted Mullvad guide to binding their VPN to qBittorrent. I don’t think they can do anything else to hinder people from using torrent for piracy.
where did they say that? Mullvad:
Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
IVPN:
Since recent similar changes in the policies of another popular VPN service provider, we have seen a significant influx of new customers, and the risks posed by such activities have grown manyfold. A considerable increase in law enforcement inquiries and erosion of relationship with data centers could threaten our ability to keep serving our customers.
I’m not very well educated in this topic, so I hope someone can correct me if I’m wrong here.
Torrenting as a whole, is not illegal. Look at Linux distributions for example, they offer direct downloads and torrents. What is illegal is distributing copyrighted files.
And torrents start seeding automatically so it’s only legal as long as you torrent files that aren’t copyrighted, right?
