And this is why - all together now - "An IP is not an ID". They don't know what you've downloaded; they know what some number of IP addresses have downloaded from some trackers at some points, and you might be have been assigned one of those IPs after the fact. They aren't useful, alone.
I've been using mullvad for a few years—since PIA got bought out—and would recommend it if you're concerned about trust.
So, using a VPN doesn't actually eliminate all possibility of being tracked. All you're doing is replacing who can potentially see all of your data, from your ISP to the VPN provider, so trust is actually a pretty important factor.
When I switched the consensus at the time was that mullvad was the most true to its privacy statement, i.e. trustworthy. A lot of other vpns are cheaper or have more bells and whistles, but have histories of data breaches or scandals, are based in countries with weak privacy/strong surveillance laws, or are owned by companies that may have an interest in the customers data (like with the PIA acquisition I mentioned).
Mullvad too has had a few incidents where they were served court orders to provide data to the police, but iirc no data was ever actually given up. Plus, they allow a bunch of different privacy-centric payment methods, including just sending cash in an envelope.
I'd recommend taking a look at some more recent discussions comparing VPNs but I think considering mullvad is a good place to start.
Sites like these are always useless, they never showed jack shit for me. Because I don't use public trackers I stick with private ones and those stupid Bots don't have access to private trackers
I’ll admit, this spooked me, but for different reasons than the OP and most comments.
I didn’t recognize any of the downloads, even though I have a publicly routable static IP and don’t use a VPN (I have a domain and self host so I know my IP hast changed in years).
I use exclusively private trackers, and nothing I’ve actually downloaded showed up, and the things that did were sporadic—one every couple days or so, first/last seen times identical, random torrents. I started asking myself if I had a rogue device in my network, so I checked logs and stats—nothing unusual (I think…I hope…hard to tell sometimes).
I looked more into how this site tracks peers, and it seems they have different levels of confidence. Their first API tier (peer API) is a “best guess” and this is based on listening to the DHT and PeX networks for their known torrents. I’m guessing their website uses this or a combination of this with their other APIs. I looked at my torrent config and saw I hadn’t disabled DHT/PeX and had a couple idle public torrents.
Not positive on this, but I think there can be false positives if your torrent box participates in DHT/PeX even if it doesn’t actually download said torrents. Can anyone confirm this?
Cool. The government is incompetent and tech illiterate here so I'm safe anyway. It's like running from a bear, I just have to outrun the others running from it.
There are people who pirate stuff from telegram using their mobile numbers, so I'm fine.
Wow! With vpn on (as usual) I get tons of other people's stuff - almost entirely movies and TV, lots of Bluey episodes in particular? Makes sense I don't see anything of mine, bc I haven't torrented anything in the past few days. When I turned the vpn off, nothing showed up. I suspected my rommate wouldn't be torrenting bc he always asks me to do it for him lol, he's less tech savvy, but it would be funny if something of his actually did show up.
Hmm I had my buddy go to this and he claims his download history has things he never downloaded. He doesn’t use a VPN and no one in his house torrents but him. Also he primarily uses a seedbox. Confusing lol.
Oh he uses T-Mobile home internet so prob shares a public IP with more than a usual ISP
I love that even the URL preview shows an IP address lol.
The site just grabs the viewers current IP I imagine it's probably whatever address is used by the instance to parse the URL and generate the preview, since it's different if I view it on my instance, vs if I view it on the original post on dbzer0
Just checked my own and was surprised nothing came up. I'd have thought I would have downloaded legit torrents from Ubuntu or Archive.org at the very least.
I don't use a VPN nor I bother with one, I download movie torrents all the time (5 this week already) and the list is completely empty. I do have dynamic IP but ir usually only changes after I restart my router, which I haven't done for a month now.
I accidentally clicked on one of the similar IPs links without realizing and someone with that ip happened to have gotten some of the same stuff I did. I was briefly quite worried.
I use Windscribe. I initially used it because the free version which gives you 10GB per month was enough for me. Then there was a deal on a lifetime subscription ages ago that I got for like $15.
If anyone wants a year subscription to Speedify VPN, DM me and I'll get you a key I got in a Humble Bundle years ago that I never used.
It's probably not a honeypot, but if I was the president of Warner Bros or Disney, I sure would want to set up a website that gathered IP addresses of people that probably download pirated media, or better yet, confirm that they did indeed download my product.