The administrator of YTS, which is currently the second largest website torrent sites in the world, provided site user data to a legal company which had taken it upon itself to discover infringers of intellectual property law.
Sites like Pirate Bay are known to store IP addresses and other data from their users, such as emails their. Users naturally hope that this data is safe.
So today TorrentFreak published evidence that shows that YTS did not respect the privacy of its users.
YTS Senthal site administrator Vijay Segaran appears to have begun working with major law firm Culpepper, providing email and IP addresses to document lawsuits filed against "pirates" in the United States.
In addition, the information was allegedly used for e-mail threats to alleged YTS users, demanding multi-cash settlements to avoid possible criminal prosecution.
TorrentFreak today featured one such email sent by Culpepper to an alleged YTS user. It lists all the information they have on the particular user, goes on to state that the law firm has filed a copyright infringement suit in a Hawaii court for account of its customers and then that it obtained the information from multiple users from the YTS website administrator.
"These include yours"
It should be noted that although they have user details there is no usable evidence that someone downloaded the torrent on their computer, except perhaps from the .torrent file which is not illegal as it only contains metadata, i.e. data that describes other data.