

Data sent home by µtorrent - ax0n
http://www.the-interweb.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/129-Data-sent-home-by-torrent.html#extended

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pyre
Not being a user of uTorrent (and therefore not knowing about uTorrent through
experience), I was a little annoyed that he waited until the very bottom to
mention:

    
    
      Oh yeah, there is a setting in the preferences dialog
      (Send detailed info when checking for updates) where
      you can disable all of this data sending. However,
      it's enabled by default so your data is sent out at
      least once when you first start the program.
    

It also seems like just an advert for the debugger he used. He doesn't mention
it specifically in the blog post, but the first comment is someone asking what
the debugger is. When the author responds with a name and a link (to another
blog post). The commenter responds with "Anyway, thanks again for introducing
this invaluable debugger" even though he states that the price tag is way too
high for him. The commenter also makes sure to explicitly state the price of
the debugger package _and_ the add-on package to it.

I could be wrong on the advert angle, but I'm skeptical of those comments.

------
nethergoat
Per the comments below the article, you can disable this by disabling the
'send anonymous usage statistics' option.

------
swolchok
While it could compromise privacy, I didn't see anything outright evil on that
list.

~~~
pyre
It sends a unique identifier to the server, and the server has access to the
IPs that you connect from to post that info/check for updates. Depending on
what they do with that information it could end up as a central repository of
your bittorrent usage statistics (assuming you only use uTorrent and only run
it on a single computer).

[EDIT] If you were downloading copyrighted content, and the RIAA/MPAA/IFPA/etc
got a hold on this information they could use it to link your computer to an
IP address (and even an IP address on at a certain date, if they web request
timestamps are logged) by correlating the IPs associated with the unique ID
recorded at the utorrent server with the unique ID stored in your settings.dat
file. They could also try and use the Total Amount Uploaded/Downloaded since
uTorrent was installed against you in court.

If you were running uTorrent in Wine, they could use that a some weak 'proof'
that it was you downloading the torrents and not someone else. (If you run
Linux/MacOSX/FreeBSD and have uTorrent installed in Wine; it's likely that
that majority of uTorrent users are on Windows)

Most of the other stuff is rather innocuous. I can't think of anyway for it to
harm you, but I'm not doing some sort of thorough analysis of it.

~~~
Perceval
There is a beta version of uTorrent for Mac OS X, but it does not have a
preference option to uncheck. It simply has "Check for Updates" -- no mention
of "detailed information" or the ability to disable it.

~~~
noarchy
uTorrent for OS X seems quite crippled, in terms of features, or at least it
did when I last used it. I do get that it is still a work in progress. For
now, I'm still using Azureus on my MBP.

~~~
ericd
If you haven't tried it, I'd highly recommend Transmission. It's the best OS X
torrent client I've found.

