New Site Tracks Illegal Downloads

There is a new website on the web garnering tons of attention from the Torrent community. The site, dubbed Youhavedownloaded.com, keeps track of everything you download from file-sharing sites. When a user visits the site, it scans your IP address and then provides a bit of feedback to exactly what you've downloaded.

How it works:

Youhavedownloaded.com, keeps a huge database of millions of media files that have been downloaded to tens of millions of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from file-sharing websites and services such as BitTorrent. When you visit the site, it automatically scans your public IP address, compares it to their database and then lists a results of any files that have been downloaded by that IP address.

Now this isn't fool-proof, as IP address are recycled by ISPs. However, Suren Ter-Saakov, one of the sites founders has confirmed the site does have access to time stamps and the distributed hash table (DHT) information associated with the torrent files. Meaning they could track the downloads back to specific users if need be.

To date, Youhavedownloaded has a database of more 53,000,000 users and 115,000 torrents made up of 1,992,000 individual files. A glance at the homepage shows a small sample of what people have downloaded, including the film "Spy Kids 4," the AMC show "The Walking Dead" and season four of FX's "Sons of Anarchy."

TorrentFreak got in touch with Suren Ter to find out why they decided to create the site and apparently out people as torrent users. His response, “We just want to remind people that the Internet is not a place to expect privacy. Nowadays many people use it without understanding what information they leave behind. Also, even those who understand choose to ignore it quite often.”

Despite its limitations and innocent nature, Youhavedownloaded.com still has the capability to scare — or shame — people into thinking before they blindly download pirated material.