Everyone wants to be the best VPN for Torrenting in 2023. But the truth is, VPNs suck for torrenting.
VPN privacy is a joke. Their speed isn’t up to snuff. And they make all sorts of claims that have been found to be untrue, time and time again.
Why people still trust this scam that calls itself an industry, after all of the times they’ve been busted, is beyond me. We’ll go over some of their failures and follies shortly, believe me.
But we’re also going to address the elephant in the room: If there is no ‘ best VPN for Torrenting’, then what are you supposed to use instead?
That’s in the last section, you can skip all the way down if you already know what a joke VPNs are.
VPN Industry Issues: IP Leaking, Fingerprinting, and Throttling
Want to know what VPNs are a joke? Buckle up.
IP leaking takes place at a ton of the top VPNs. Here’s the study that busts the industry claim of IP protection wide open. Literally, two of the top 11 VPNs manage to protect your IP address consistently. And that’s the bare minimum you should expect from them! The rest just share your real IP address with the world in one way or another. Useless, overpriced scams.
Here are some of the ways they fail:
Lots of VPN providers still don’t support Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), after around a decade. That’s right, World IPv6 Launch Day was on the 6th of June, 2012. Ten years down the line, these idiots still only support the legacy IPv4. When they see IPv6 traffic, they just flake out and let it pass right through. This of course can compromise your IPv4 address too.
And look at the graph that shows how completely useless they are at stopping leaks via WebRTC. WebRTC is an HTML5 standard that lets services dig around for the best routing information when they stream voice, video, or peer-to-peer. I can’t stress this enough… it was launched in 2011. Seriously. They’ve had 11 years to come to grips with this stuff, and they’ve failed. There was a full release party of WebRTC 1.0 back in 2018 too, another chance for them to come to grips with reality. Nope. Look at all the orange and red in that graph! Unreal.Don’t get me started on VPNs that have killswitch issues. These are also called link disruption leaks. This is what happens when the VPN goes down for some reason, but it doesn’t automatically stop you from transmitting data. So now that data just gets sent in the clear, without using your VPN at all. Killswitches are supposed to be the standard. All that yellow you see on the graph? Killswitch failures.
Anyway, it hardly matters. Even if the VPN is working perfectly, you can still be caught if you’re Torrenting anything suspicious through it.
Why? Because VPNs don’t stop browser or device fingerprinting! They never have.
Browser fingerprinting, or building a profile of you based on your devices and drivers rather than an IP address or user ID, is becoming the most common way to be tracked online. The old method, third-party cookies, is being phased out by browsers. So governments and advertisers are using an alternative way to ID individual users: They scrape as much device and browser data as they can and build profiles of each user.
This works on browsers, on web apps, on anything that uses a Chromium shell… you name it. All of them are vulnerable to fingerprinting. And VPNs are helpless against it.
And to all of those people who think that VPNs will protect them against all bandwidth throttling: Not always!
In fact, this defense only works in countries already ignoring Net Neutrality. Even then, ISPs will simply look at raw data transfer amounts, bandwidth cap patterns, and raw bitflow data to determine if you’re doing something fishy. They don’t need to look inside the packets. They can just throttle you and claim ‘fair use’.
So What Do I Use?
Use something actually designed to protect you: A dedicated privacy app.
VPNs aren’t designed with privacy in mind. They were just designed to allow remote workers to tunnel into their corporate networks. Changing your IP address is about the most minimal, lamest form of ‘privacy’ you can think of.Browser fingerprinting destroys any illusion of VPN ‘privacy’. Police, prosecutors, and judges are all being taught about tracking people down using browser fingerprinting. This stuff has been talked about for nearly a decade.
If you know nothing about privacy apps, and you still want to circumvent IP leakage and browser fingerprinting, here’s a good place to start: Hoody.
Hoody creates a mini virtual machine for each web browser tab and web app that you’re running. So the fingerprint information is generated by the VM, rather than your own system. This creates a layer of separation that is so complete, that the fingerprint generated could be for some random version of Linux running an obscure custom browser. Or it could be all of the most common, mainstream parameters around. But you’ll just see a normal web page.
The Hoody app not only hides your IP address – fully and without leakage by the way – but it looks for the fastest, least censored content that it can find when you search for something. It fires off multiple regional requests and only returns the best, most raw results.
Hoody’s Torrent-specific features include aggressive seeding of hard-to-populate files. It always uses the fully encrypted, private network to create secure, anonymous Websocket tunnels for your Torrents. It caches trackers for you, searches for extra seeders as needed, and even looks for the file in static caches online. This means you can download the Torrent using multiple protocols from multiple sources simultaneously.
So that’s how VPNs fail. And that’s why anyone serious about privacy, which should be everyone given the state of the world, needs to look into serious privacy apps instead.
