Your ISP tracks you, and therefore they’re aware of your P2P activities. By monitoring your bandwidth, port number, IP address and inspecting your data packets, they can view your torrent traffic.
Torrenting legality makes it controversial, and thus, if your ISP sees your torrent traffic, you have to deal with legal consequences like copyright violations and DMCA notices. To enjoy your torrent downloading experience, it is best that you hide your torrent activities.
How to Hide Your Torrents From ISPs
There is no wrong with downloading legal content via torrenting. But because of the significant risks surrounding torrenting, hiding the torrent traffic from the ISP is always a better idea. After long hours of research, this article comes up with the best ways to hide your torrents traffic from the ISPs. Let’s discuss them one by one:
1. Use a VPN
A VPN is the most efficient tool to use for torrenting. It hides your torrent traffic and boosts your online security and privacy. When you use a VPN for torrenting so, it helps you in the following ways:
- A VPN by masking your IP address and spoofing your location makes it impossible for the ISP to track and detect your online identity.
- By using strong encryption and tunneling protocols, a VPN makes it challenging for the ISP, copyright owners, and even hackers to know about your online activities.
- A VPN even offers a dedicated IP address feature to the users. This specific IP address allows users to connect to the internet using worldwide servers.
- By offering an extensive server network, fast connection speed, and unlimited bandwidth, a VPN even helps in bypassing ISP throttling.
- It comes with various security boosting features such as a kill switch, SOCKS5 proxy, and split tunneling that helps in increasing your security during torrenting.
Before using a VPN for torrenting, make sure you choose the right one. While looking out for the best VPN for torrenting, you might come across various names but do thorough research before making the final choice. You should look out for special features in a VPN like:
- IP leak protection
- P2P-optimized servers
- No-log policy
- Strong protocols
- Torrent-specific features
- Military-grade encryption like AES-256 bit.
- Safe jurisdiction
CyberGhost, NordVPN, and ProtonVPN are some of the best VPN for torrenting. They come with all the vital features required for torrenting, and thus you can consider using them.
2. Use Sandbox
You might find VPN and Sandbox similar, but they aren’t in many ways. A sandbox is a company that provides P2P-optimized servers for downloading torrents. Hiding your IP address makes you anonymous over the internet and ensures that your ISP doesn’t snoop on your P2P activities. Also, it uses HTTPS encryption that hides your torrent traffic, and thus it isn’t easy for anyone to track you back. You can access any reliable seedbox service via the torrent client web interface. You need to upload the torrent files to the sandbox and download it instantly.
Using a Sandbox is a reliable method to protect your torrent traffic from ISP surveillance. It eradicates speed throttling issues and speeds up your downloading. Besides this, it does provide high uploading and downloading speed for torrents.
However, it costs you more than a VPN in terms of price. Also, while using a sandbox, you have to manage two separate downloading procedures while a VPN downloads the torrent file directly on your device. Even a Seedbox won’t offer any protection to hide your information while searching for a torrent file on a search engine. Thus, you should use both seedbox and VPN for extra safety and security.
3. Use Anomas
Anomas are torrent clients like BitTorrent trackers that provide end-to-encryption and ensure a secure and safe torrenting experience. It uses end-to-end encryption and onion routing technology. Doing so hides your online identity and encrypts the data, making you anonymous during torrenting.
It also prevents ISPs and copyright owners from spying on your torrent traffic. You can freely download this software on Mac, Linux, and Windows and enjoy secure torrenting.
Why Should You Hide Your Torrent Traffic From the ISP?
Undoubtedly, torrenting is an effective method for quickly downloading and sharing large amounts of data. Knowing the risks and disputes surrounding torrenting legality, it’s vital that you should hide your torrent traffic from the shifty eyes of the ISP.
Here are some of the most prominent reasons that increase the urge to protect torrent traffic. So, let’s overview it:
Torrenting risks your online anonymity:
When you download a torrent file from the P2P swarm, your IP address is exposed to every member connected to the same server. It also includes your ISP and the copyright owners who’re looking for people downloading content without their permission. By viewing your IP address, they can track your P2P activities. Thus, to enjoy maximum anonymity during anonymity, hide the torrent traffic from the ISP.
You face ISP throttling issues:
Your ISP is always looking for activities that consume much bandwidth and then intentionally slow down your internet speed. Torrenting is one such activity that uses much of your total bandwidth, so; it’s better to hide this activity rather than allowing the ISP to limit your activities.
Many governments frown upon torrenting:
The governments of different countries don’t support torrenting because they significantly contain unauthorized content. If the authorities find you downloading torrents, they sue you with hefty fines, and in extreme cases, you end up going to jail.
You might accidentally violate copyright laws:
The copyright owners might hunt your IP address from the torrent client and pass it to lawyers and agencies that will take legal action against you.
With the reasons discussed above, it won’t be wrong to say that torrenting is way too risky if you don’t take any protective measures. So, next time you want to download torrents, first make sure that you protect the torrent traffic through a legitimate and secure VPN provider.
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Final Thoughts
If you go unprotected to the web to download torrents, it would just bring trouble for you instead of enjoyment. Torrenting because of its association with copyrighted content is deemed illegal, and various countries have drafted laws against it. Your ISP tracks your IP address, monitors your P2P activities, and takes action against it. Hence, you must hide your torrent traffic from the ISP. Various methods have been suggested to hide your P2P activities, but encrypting the data traffic is best. So, use a reliable VPN provider and safeguard your data against ISP tracking.
