How do you overcome the fears of using your home IP to join a private tracker?

trivial99@lemmy.ml to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 55 points –

I'm considering joining my first private tracker. It turns out that most of them need you to pass an interview connected through your home IP. I understand this is a reasonable way to filter scammers and duplicate accounts. Still, to those who did it, how do you feel knowing your main IP is stored and associated to your torrenting history?

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I've never had one that required an interview, but my primary private tracker requires you to log into the webpage not on a VPN. They still suggest heavily that any torrenting is done on a VPN though.

If the owners of the site are competent, they're gonna hash your IP for their logs and not store the actual IP. Hashing is a one-way process, they won't be able to reconstruct your IP from it. If they're storing your raw IP, probably stay away. (Honestly, you can't do nearly as much damage with an IP address as people think, but it'd be a hint to way worse security practices elsewhere)

Thanks. Question is: how can one know the security practices behind the scenes? I guess it's a matter of trust and luck after all!

Trust. No way there are trackers that have been audited