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It’s a poor analogy, but imagine a public IP like a hotel, there can be lots of guests (clients) at this hotel. Hotel policy is they won’t let any outsiders in unless you know the room number (port) of the person you’re trying to reach.
Imagine you and a friend are staying in separate hotels and want to give each other copies of your favorite Linux .ISOs, but neither of you knows the other’s room number - you show up at the hotel and the front desk tells you to pound sand because you don’t have their room number.
As long as one of you knows the other’s room number though, you can meet.
Torrenting without port forwarding means you can only trade your favorite .ISOs with people who have port forwarding enabled (sharing their room number to the tracker), which makes you less effective of a seeder. Enabling port forwarding allows you to share with anyone (sharing your room number with the tracker).
I literally, unknowingly, watched this unfold with my dad recently. He got a text along the lines of “final notice of unpaid toll from [local toll road entity], pay by end of day to avoid late payment fees” with a link.
He (on the side, while we were all doing something else) went in, entered his drivers license info, date of birth, and credit card number to “pay” the toll.
About 30 second after setting his phone down he just goes “shit, that was a scam, wasn’t it” and describes the text to us.
A little bit too much trust, and a false deadline can go a long way.
It looks like you’re missing the “Manage shared info” section and “Personalized Shopping” link, which yields the above toggle for me (CA, US)…
The question is, is it gone because your privacy laws make it impossible to even offer, or because your privacy laws don’t require them to care about your opinion at all?