There has been some buzz about the Pirate Bay’s “privacy policy” this week.

Twitter user @pokex started it, by pointing out that The Pirate Bay is storing the IP-addresses of its users.

The story was picked up by ZDNet today, with the disclaimer that they could not verify the accuracy of the screenshots.

But we can…

The information shared by Pokex is not new and comes from an older news article covering a Pirate Bay “hack” in 2010.

At the time a group of Argentinian hackers have managed to gain access to The Pirate Bay’s admin panel through a security breach, but no user information was leaked to the public.

The hackers did show what information TPB shares on its users.

So yes, like pretty much every website on the Internet The Pirate Bay stores IP-addresses. At The Pirate Bay, this is mostly used to deal with the massive onslaught of spammers.

For those who value their privacy it’s probably wise to use a VPN service, but that should be common knowledge by now.

Update: The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the IP-addresses are stored temporarily, and that they will be unavailable in case someone gets their hands on the server.

“IPs are stored for 48 hours, and they are stored in ram so if someone tries to take a server the information is lost”

“They are stored in a HEAP table in mysql, wich is the memory storage engine, and are encrypted in case someone finds a sql-injection and takes the database”