The fact you are searching for whether torrenting is safe most likely means that what you will download is not safe.
If you are wondering is torrenting safe, as it is, it’s completely legal and safe. The problems start when you start to download illegal content. Not only are you not protected and could end up in trouble with the law and your internet provider when torrenting, but torrenting could also harm you in a lot of ways. More on that below.
There are 2 major problems with torrenting safe.
The first one? You expose yourself to your government and internet provider that does “not track you.”
Will you get in trouble? It depends on what you download and in what country you download it. We’ll go through how to protect yourself when torrenting from that side of things in this post, but before we do that, let’s talk about the second risk.
The second risk? You downloading something with viruses planted inside the files you download.
If you decide to download something illegally which PrivateVPN does not encourage in any way, you put yourself at risk of downloading something that will mess up your device up whether by damaging your system or slowing it down. That’s the price you pay when you are desperate to download something for free. People that put things to download on the internet, they know that you are desperate, and some have no problem putting in hidden mining software that will mine the likes of Bitcoin for them, from your device. And that, we cannot protect you from.
With a VPN.
That’s how.
Think of a VPN as a protection layer for everything you do through the internet. A protection layer that encrypts everything you do on the internet making it untraceable to everyone else, in your case, allowing you to download whatever you desire without anyone knowing anything about it.
Is it as simple as encryption? Unfortunately not.
What often matters more than encryption is the service you use and the features it comes with.
Do you think that a VPN service cares about you when somebody from the government in which they are in asks about your logs? Especially pressured? If you do some Google searches, you will get your answers pretty quickly.
More than a few VPN companies store logs from your usage which contain information that can expose you.
There’s also a bunch that said that they don’t store logs, and then got exposed for it.
This is the situation in which it’s best to trust the laws of the country rather than just the words of a company. PrivateVPN? It’s based in Sweden. The country with strict privacy laws preventing us from storing logs that could be used to expose you, if we had interest in your logs in the first place.
We aren’t saying that PrivateVPN is your only option in that field, but if you want to protect yourself when torrenting, make sure the VPN service is based in a country with strong privacy laws.
You can have the best encryption on the planet, you can use a VPN service that does not store logs, but if you want to protect yourself when torrenting, the VPN service you are using needs to be able to protect you against leaks.
Airplanes are the safest means of transport on the planet, yet they still crash. Regardless of how great the VPN you are using is, if you want to protect yourself when torrenting, the safest VPN is one that also has features that will protect you.
In this instance?
IPv6 Leak Protection along with DNS Leak Protection.
These two will prevent any IP and DNS leaks that can potentially happen, and result in all of the protection applied to be for nothing.
But what if your VPN service stops working? PrivateVPN has fantastic 99.98% uptime for instance, but there is always that .02% possibility. That’s where Application Guard and Killswitch come in. Killswitch will kill your internet if a VPN stops working preventing you from using the internet without protection, thus preventing exposure, meanwhile, Application Guard will turn off any apps that you wish to be turned off in an event of exposure, such as your torrenting client.
If you want to protect yourself when torrenting, these features are needed, otherwise, you put yourself at risk of exposure.
You were wondering about whether is torrenting safe. Torrenting by itself is safe and even legal. The problems start when you download illegally, both for legal and virus reasons.
That’s why protection from every single angle is a must. It’s not enough to have the best protection at almost every single angle if you are not protected at every single angle, as any possibility of exposure can make all of the other protection for nothing. And that’s why PrivateVPN comes with features that will protect you from every single angle, as while it does not support piracy, it does care about privacy.
Written by Michael Smolski.