Deleted original comment, and btw - all the comments attached to this just underline the fact that the piratebay is not exactly user friendly AND ALSO BTW - A VPN doesn't in any way guarantee that your IP address can't leak out in a number of ways.
The torrent being "trusted" has absolutely nothing to do with whether your ISP is spying on your traffic. Paying for and enabling a VPN service is step 0 of torrent client use because it eliminates this issue.
“Trusted” is referring more to where the files came from. Is it a real account associated with some movie ripping group? Or is it someone pretending to be them and distributing malware?
BitTorrent is peer-to-peer. Anyone can join a swarm and see the IP addresses of other computers they’re communicating with. Knowing the files came from a trusted a trusted uploader won’t hide your identity from that.
Like many others here, Steam/Netflix/Spotify have largely stopped me from torrenting anything. But we continue to slide toward needing a separate streaming service for every single TV series, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see the piracy pendulum swing back the other way.
It's been a few years since I bothered torrenting much, but if you don't change the defaults on your torrent client, even then you'd get flagged pretty quickly. Biggest thing used to be not throttling upload speed; almost all consumers are going to be downloading wildly more than they upload, and even heavy users of upload bandwidth are going to primarily be shooting it to well-known destinations. If you start uploading at 100MB/s to random IPs, that looks suspicious.
PirateBay is probably the most common place to find torrents watched by rightsholders. Doing illegal things in general is dumb, but if you're going to pirate, go do it over the free wi-fi at McDonald's or Walmart.
Yeah, you don't torrent hollywood shit, that's well known. For that you either pay the troll toll or take the high road. I've personally chosen to just not watch hollywood movies and my life is a lot better off for it.
