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How does this work? I thought the whole idea of the torrent protocol was to prevent identification of who downloads what.
by peterbmarks 6y ago
How does this work? I thought the whole idea of the torrent protocol was to prevent identification of who downloads what.
- gcbw3 6y agoyou should forget whatever you read and start over :) The purpose of it is exactly to help you find other peers with the same content. It's a bunch of peer finding protocols on top of each other. Trackers, DHT, peer xchange, etc, etc I mean, the data itself is all hashes, but very public hashes. Unless you hashed it yourself and shared only the hash ever, the reverse hash is a websearch away.
- cactus2093 6y agoNot sure where you got that idea, maybe you're mixing up torrents with Tor or with gray area VPN services that people use while torrenting to anonymize themselves. The whole reason you can google "____ Torrent" and get results is because there are torrent trackers out there that, well, track which IP addresses have which files. The same thing that allows those to exist allows someone to watch and record who is downloading which torrents. Which is what movie studios and the like are doing as well when they send out copyright warnings based on torrenting.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dkarp 6y agoThe point of the protocol is to distribute data efficiently. It has nothing to do with privacy. Maybe you’re thinking of Tor?
- MarcellusDrum 6y agoOn the contrary. It is extremely easy to know the IP addresses of all downloading. This is a major problem in PeerTube as well, as you can know what videos someone watch. I'm not up-to-date with this, but last I checked, this was still unsolved.