The Central District of California has overruled company privacy policies. So beware that even if a web site says it's not tracking you, it may be anyway.

The ruling came in Columbia Pictures v. Bunnell where the movie studio wanted to identify people downloading copyrighted movies. Now I won't even get into the illogic of this. TorrentSpy doesn't know who downloaded movies. It may only know who downloaded torrents, which CAN be used to download movies. They are similar to a URL in that they contain information that enables downloading, but such downloading is a subsequent and separate step that has nothing to do with TorrentSpy.

TorrentSpy tells its visitors it doesn't capture any personal information. Columbia said that it can in the form of IP address, which can be captured by the web server. The court said that the fact that IP address is temporarily stored in RAM is sufficient for it to compel TorrentSpy to record it permanently in a log file.