• Kajika@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    There are many layers we could talk about when we say “privacy”.

    First about IP:

    • publicly broadcast your IP: this is done if you announce yourself to one or multiple trackers. Their jobs is to list the clients sharing specific torrents. They maintain a list of IPs and respective progress on the torrents so all clients can connect with each other depending or their needs. You can use this to bootstrap your client need and leave instantly if you don’t want to be found (defeat the purpose of torrent…).
    • there is also the DHT protocol that will distribute the list of IPs amoungs clients so no one has the full list. I am not well versed into it yet. You can search for more info.
    • finally PEX is a peer exchange protocol to get new clients from the one you already have.

    There’s also traffic monitoring:

    • like https you probably want to encrypt your traffic if you don’t want people to catch it. Most decent clients have the option but it’s never set strictly so the choice of encryption is optional on default. ISP love to sniff your traffic, I usually don’t care but whenever I need to download an other Linux distro image I need to use a VPN or be throttled. I’m not even doing it to hide anything, just to use my internet connection…

    The op question makes no sense to me though. Torrents are just file you want to get/share, there’s no privacy involved in that. Maybe they meant torrent clients.