Protecting your privacy while using bittorrent!

Torrent these days is one of the most loved platform for downloading files, mostly cracked one. With piracy arrives the risk of protecting your privacy. Here we will explain you how to protect your privacy while using bittorrent, one of the famous torrent clients out there. Viruses and other forms of malware are the most basic of threats.  The files you download are foreign and you should treat them as such; scan them promptly after downloading them.  Most major anti-virus programs have the ability to add folders for auto-scanning, which is probably the ideal solution if you either don’t have time or don’t want to waste effort doing things manually.

Encryption

One way to help alleviate these problems is to enable encryption for your connections.  This prevents the data sent between two peers from being understood by onlookers, although it doesn’t prevent them from seeing their IP addresses or certain details from the tracker, such as amount of data transferred.

This is not a perfect solution, however.  Encryption has to be supported by your peers as well, and they may not have their clients set to use it.  Some trackers don’t even allow encryption, but if yours does, it’s not a bad idea to enable preferring encrypted connections, but allowing unencrypted transfers if none are present.

Enable Encryption in uTorrent

Open uTorrent, go to Options > Preferences, and then click where it says BitTorrent on the left. Under where it says “Protocol Encryption,” choose Enabled and click on Allow incoming legacy connections.  This will allow outbound encryption but still accept non-encrypted connections when there are no encrypted connections available.

IP Blockers

Another thing you can do is use an IP blocker.  These programs run alongside an existing firewall (you DO have a firewall, don’t you?) and your BitTorrent client and they filter out IP addresses based on blocklists.  Blocklists compound ranges of IPs that contain known problems, such as monitoring and bad packet transfer.  How well they work is up for debate, and there is no consensus on whether they do anything at all.  Websites and trackers that are fine sometimes get blocked, and you have to manually allow them.

If you’re a cautious person, however, it’s not a bad idea to run an IP blocker just in case.  The most well-known ones are PeerBlock for Windows and Moblock for Linux, and Transmission for both Mac and Linux has the ability to use a blocklist.  PeerBlock, once installed, allows you to download and update blocklists and automatically starts to block IP addresses.

Install and Configure PeerBlock on Windows

Download PeerBlock from their website.  The beta is pretty stable and provides the most useful features, and is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 (all versions).