Data sent home by µtorrent | Hacker News Reader

Data sent home by µtorrent

the-interweb.com

26 pointsax0n7 comments

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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