TorrentSpy Forced to Spy Users and Offer Private Information

A federal judge demanded TorrentSpy, one of the most popular BitTorrent websites on the Internet, to provide private information about its users and present it to the authorities. Jacqueline Chooljian, the judge from the Central District of California in Los Angeles, required detailed logs to analyze the users’ activity on the website but offered a period of time to allow TorrentSpy to appeal the decision. According to CNET, TorrentSpy's attorney Ira Rothken sustained that the appeal must be made until June 12 but didn’t mention if they plan to accept the decision or not.

The case is at least interesting because TorrentSpy sustains into its guidelines that your privacy is 100 percent safe and no details will be offered to other websites until you agree it. "TorrentSpy does not sell, trade or rent your personal information to other companies. TorrentSpy will not collect any personal information about you except when you specifically and knowingly provide such information," it is mentioned.

TorrentSpy’s lawyer tried an intelligent move and refers to the website as to the entire Internet, sustaining the judge’s order will affect all the pages that are offering strict privacy policies. I agree that this will be a dangerous precedent because our Internet privacy might be threatened anytime by the federal demands concerning our information.

""It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users. If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise," Ira Rothken said according to CNET.

The entire case started in February 2006 when a group of movie producers including Columbia Pictures sued TorrentSpy for encouraging users to download pirated movies as well as providing direct links to them. The Motion Picture Association of America added that it was extremely simple to download a pirated copy of their movies because TorrentSpy offered links to almost any film.

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