Bittorrent client Bitthief spies on users

Bitthief, as the name already implies, is a bittorrent client that leeches from the community without giving something back to it. It basically reminds me of those leecher mods for emule that have been popular a few years ago. Bitthief accomplishes this by reducing the upload speed to 0. The developer of Bitthief, the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich puts it this way:

“We developed a BitTorrent client that free rides on BitTorrent, that is, it downloads from BitTorrent swarms without contributing any resources itself which illustrated that the BitTorrent protocol currently fails to prevent uncooperative behavior as it does not provide any countermeasures against free riding clients.”

It seems that Bitthief does not only prevent fair sharing but also spies on the users that use the client. Torrentfreak that Bitthief is currently collecting “the torrent hash, total size of the download, the current version of the client, total number of pieces available, and the size of these pieces” which can be clearly linked to the users IP address making it very easy to idenfity all activity of a certain user.

Everyone who is thinking about using Bitthief should be really cautious and consider this before using it. No one knows at this time why the developers are collecting the data which should make everyone at least suspicious.