How Risky is to Use Rapidshare after all?

[SonsOfLiberty]

The file sharing site RapidShare may gain a bad rap. There are reports circulating around according to which a person who has been recently arrested for uploading content online would have Rapidshare to “thank” for collaborating with German authorities and disclosing his personal information that led to the raid.

While the truth in this case remains to be found out, the site confirmed that it saves data which could indeed be used to identify file sharers. It’s only natural for one who uses Rapidshare to start wondering how much information the website has on him or her and how the site can use that information especially that Rapidshare.com doesn’t show any privacy policy and its Terms of Use make no reference to the issue or to the Rapidshare's log files.

The company was willing to answer a few questions P2PBlog.com has come up with, and the main topics have been addressed in the ‘interview’ posted below:

What happens if an unregistered user or the user of a free account downloads a file?

Rapidshare: "In the case of Free Users, we log how much data is downloaded from which IP address within the last 10-100 minutes. This information is kept for about two hours."

How about downloads initiated by premium users?

Rapidshare: "We log how much data is saved on which day from which IP address by Premium Users. This information is currently kept for 30 days and can be accessed within the Premium Zone."

Do you keep a record of the files I download?

Rapidshare: "We don't have any logs about which user downloads which file."

So what about uploads?

Rapidshare: "For uploads we save when and from which IP address a file is being uploaded."


Rapidshare didn’t reveal how long the company holds on to an IP address of a user but the fact that it agreed to answer these question is already a good sign and probably a privacy policy will also become available soon.

Source: http://www.p2pon.com/2009/04/15/how-...are-after-all/

[sam45]

Interesting article, why don't the authorities go after RAPIDSHARE for hosting all the illegal content. Their the ones facilitating the piracy.

[Windy72]

Rapidshare host the file they are ultimately responsible. They need to filter copyright material on their servers. If they cannot they are providing a service to download copyright material. The buck should stop at the service provider namely Rapidshare. If the water is too hot then Rapidshare should bail out of poviding a service or effectivelly filter copyright material.

[100%]

There are better options than rapidsh. All have equally the same privacy issues.