Free ‘BitTorrent VPN’ Grows to 300,000 Members in a Year
ItsHidden is a VPN service that was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities. The service launched less than a year ago, but with the increased demand for anonymous BitTorrent it has already amassed 300,000 members.
As pressure from anti-piracy outfits on governments to implement strict anti-piracy laws increases, millions of file-sharers have decided to protect their privacy by going anonymous.
The most common and widely used privacy services are VPNs that allow users to connect to the Internet whilst hiding their own IP-address, making BitTorrent transfers completely anonymous.
ItsHidden is one of the rare free VPN solutions currently available. It launched July last year and TorrentFreak has learned that less than 12 months later the service already has 300,000 members with a free account.
Update: Itshidden stopped offering free accounts but TorrentPrivacy currently has a limited free trial available here.
Besides the free accounts, tens of thousands of people have signed up to the paid option. These benefit from additional features and no bandwidth restrictions, which is probably the preferred choice for heavy downloaders.
A while ago we spoke with David, one of the people behind the service, who told us that they set their VPN up with BitTorrent users in mind.
“It has been created to put some rights back in the favor of the user and that includes us,” David from ItsHidden explained to TorrentFreak. “There are so many bodies, mostly unelected, that seem to have full access to the most intimate of online details with little or no justification and more importantly, no evidence.”
The service encrypts the connection between the user and ItsHidden’s servers and prevents anyone from reading this data as it is sent or received. No data logs are kept of the user’s transfers, which makes it as private as it gets.
Of the 300,000 free users that signed up in the past year, 56,262 log in on an average day, transferring thousands of gigabytes. Due to the overwhelming interest in free accounts, ItsHidden had to disable new signups a few months ago, but they are currently allowing new members to join again.
