The risks of downloading music at home with wifi

Like the stupid newbie goober I am, I forgot the first step to downloading music: do it in a public setting with a public wifi. Ended up downloading it all at home off of our private wifi. Did use a VPN but forgot to switch it from my home country. Kind of wondering how easy it is to trace me and persecute me for this. I am not the one handling the ordeal with the wifi, that would be my lovely mother.

Cheers y'all!

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To add a bit: It doesn't make a difference whether you're use a cable or the wifi. It's still the same internet connection. What helps is the VPN connection. And it doesn't really matter if you're setting it to your home country or a random one. If it protects you as intended, they can't find you either way. And if it doesn't, you may be screwed either way.
- The country of the vpn server does matter, as does the home country. Your traffic may be encrypted and the vpn company may not keep logs, but the datacenters they're renting likely do. Always favor countries that have the strongest privacy laws. i.e. not the US.
  
  Is there some precedent to believe that they correlate (encrypted) datacenter traffic, find the patterns and actually use that somehow?
  I mean I can see how that'd theoretically work under certain circumstances and low network load on the VPN server. But that's really complicated, circumstantial, unreliable and takes lots of effort and probably can't be used in court anyways. So I wonder if that's ever been done. Maybe for some circumstancial evidence for some proper crimes to find out where to investigate? And I mean I'm pretty sure the NSA snoops everywhere. Still they're unlikely to be able to look inside with just these tools. And they're also unlikely to prosecute some swedish user for some lame copyright violation.
  
  What are you talking about bro? What do you think the date center will do if vpn company doesn't keep logs?
  By design vpn encrypts the the traffic between you and vpn provider that means its the ip of the vpn that talks to data center. For all intents and purposes it is the vpn company talking to data center. Even if data center is malicious and decides to take action it will take this action against vpn provider which will not link back to you.

Don't know if this will help assuage your fears: https://www.techradar.com/news/mullvads-no-log-policy-proven-after-police-raid
I've used Mullvad for years, and from what I know, they store almost nothing -- only your randomly generated account number. If you are paying using an anonymous method that's even less to go on.

It's just music, not csam
There are many ai companies pirating millions of songs for their profit and they are operating without problems, what they're going to do to an individual that "stole" a couple songs?
- Wait until you hear about this new thing called: one set of rules for rich people & their companies, one set of rules for poor people
- Now this is some horrible advice. Bravo
  
  He said he was using mullvad in Sweden, not north Korea where there's the death penalty for listening k-pop
  In order to identify a no log VPN user someone without limits like the secret services would need to triangulate the logs of millions of other services and see something like "at 11:23:42.052 the ISP recorded that subscriber #4332822 sent a request to the IP address of the VPN server and at the same time a login to musicpirate@gmail.com is made from that VPN server"
  It's very unlikely that is going to happen for something that's not even a real crime

Why do people call the internet connection "the wifi" now?
- Because many many people know absolutely nothing about ethernet or the actual hardware behind their wifi connection, as quite often that was setup by a technician from their ISP. When it comes to acquiring internet; a wifi name+password is all they've ever experienced.
  
  I know I'm a techie but I can't wrap my head around how people have ZERO idea how any of this system (internet) works and sometimes even get mad if you try to explain it. So much......everything revolves around it now.
  I don't like cars, but when I had one I still learned the basics of how it runs and how to do a certain level of maintenance. I can't imagine just living some "haha car go brrr" life.
- These are the people that complain to their ISP when their game 'lags' on their wireless connected computer several rooms away from the router.

Depends on country you happen to be in. If it's Poland or eastern Europe noone will give a damn. If it's Germany then you might be screwed. If you're on a good VPN you should be ok even in Germany.

Depends on country and VPN provider
- Sweden, Mullvad.
  
  The only way to find out it was you, would be to ask the VPN provider. Mullvad has a perfect track record of not keeping logs tho, so it's very unlikely they're gonna get anything from them. All that work wouldn't even be worth it for someone just downloading some music like you do.
  I have my torrent client running 24/7 connected to a different VPN to my home country, Germany, as well and nothing's ever happened, even though Germany is pretty strict when it comes to this stuff.
  
  Then i dont see an issue here. Mullvad doesn‘t give out or log ip addresses. You should be fine

Before looking at VPNs, you should be encrypting your torrent traffic in the client
Note:* Remember that the encryption torrent option only encrypts your inbound and outbound torrent traffic. Although it will not be readable, your traffic can still be intercepted and tagged as torrent traffic. If you want to increase your privacy, you’ll need to encrypt the entire layer 3 traffic (at the IP level), so it is recommended to set Deluge with VPN. To hide traffic at layer 7 (application layer), use a torrent Proxy. And finally, to hide, encrypt, and speed up your torrents, use a Seedbox.*

Ayo, just saw this and wanna say that by downloading music from deezer it's probably appearing as if you legitimately downloaded a lot of music today. Deezer even lets you download music offline. Kinda doubt anyone can tell apart legitimate use from your use. You didnt torrent music which could theoricially raise a red flag. (I have downloaded ~3k+ songs from my home netowork without vpn with Deemix in Greece.) You should probably be fine:)
- I don't even fully understand torrenting and how to do it, so I suppose that's a relief in this case. I can be carelessly quick with stuff like this, lol.

32 comments