BitTorrent privacy punks commuters

One of BitTorrent's billboards. (Image: BitTorrent)

One of BitTorrent’s billboards. (Image: BitTorrent)

Maybe the following idea threw you for a loop on the drive to work:




These menacing messages were on billboards in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. They were erected by BitTorrent designed, obviously, to shock consumers into remembering the biggest issues on the Web.

Now, BitTorrent is no advocacy group. It’s a business that makes money off software. That software employs the BitTorrent protocol, in case you were confused, like other services such as µTorrent, Vuze and many others. BitTorrent Inc., who posted the billboards, is the most popular, however, founded by the protocol’s original author, Bram Cohen, who is still the company’s chief scientist.

All Clients use the open BitTorrent protocol to dodge privacy and copyright rules online, creating a distributed peer-to-peer network of software and media downloads.

Say you want a movie and 40 people on the BitTorrent network have a copy. The BitTorrent protocol pulls pieces of the movie’s code to recreate that file from each of the 40 computers. This makes tracking very difficult. Though BitTorrent says piracy is not the intended use of the software, copyright advocates would be excused if they don’t see BitTorrent’s billboards in the same noble light as others.

Advertising motivations aside, the billboards raise important questions. Who owns what data? If a consumer loads a picture to Facebook, Google or Yahoo, do they own the picture or does the host company? After all, they are using the company (in 99 percent of the cases) for free and using its servers to store the picture. But at the same time, confusing terms of service can mean that that picture, or any personal data, can be used in ways unknown to the consumer.

Not to mention, we still must decide how much law enforcement surveillance we’re OK with. The idea of government spooks having access to e-mail and geo-locations is not pleasant. But at the same time, that access can help stop or solve crimes.

“Your data belongs to you,” wrote Matt Mason, BitTorrent Inc’s vice president of marketing. “You deserve options. And the Internet is above all else powered by people.”

(This post was updated with BitTorrent’s stated intended use of the software.)

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