All of us have made privacy mistakes at some point in our privacy journeys. In an effort to help those earlier on in that journey, please share some of the mistakes you’ve made, and how you could have prevented it.
All of us have made privacy mistakes at some point in our privacy journeys. In an effort to help those earlier on in that journey, please share some of the mistakes you’ve made, and how you could have prevented it.
Using a VPN for torrents and forgetting to set it up to kill the network connection when VPN is lost. Got a couple “love letters” from my ISP that way.
After getting those nastygrams myself then having to troubleshoot some other issues, I’ve ended up using solely a private tracker (iptorrents because I couldn’t get an invite elsewhere) for torrents which I only use for manual search in radar/sonarr to minimize seeding space. Automatic downloads go through Usenet if I add something to my watchlist. I did have torrenting bound to PIA as a VPN in the past, but with Usenet and a private tracker I never felt the need to renew it.
I taped my latest DMCA letter to the wall to remind myself of this. I also wrote a small script to kill torrent processes and eventually break the software adapter if needed if certain gateways are reachable.
Looks like a hacky and far from perfect approach here. In the gap where you lose your VPN connection and the script triggers, there’s a timeframe that your torrent software will leak a lot of data. A better approach here is to enforce only VPN connections via your firewall. Whitelist outgoing connections to your VPN destination, blacklist the rest. On Linux make the torrent systemd unit also have a dependency on the VPN connection, that it: your torrent service won’t start if the VPN service isn’t active. So in case your VPN disables at some point,the firewall will still do its work.