get your credit card stolen.

Let’s see… I don’t provide my credit card to anyone when pirating. The only way they are getting my credit card is breaking into my house. (no, mkv files can’t have viruses).

But I do need to provide my credit card info to HBO, which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers.

The number of credit cards stones from data leaks very likely exceeds the number of them stolen because someone got duped when trying to pirate.

Pretty sure HBO was willing go to for multiple more seasons (why would they not?), but Dumb and Dumber decided to rush the ending.

Just clarifying because it looks like by they you mean HBO.

That could indicate a lot of things. It would be very difficult to distinguish a torrent from something like cloud folder sync. And that would still be a statistical guess. No ISP is going to go after customers because their VPN traffic is potentially torrent traffic.

Besides, even if they could detect that torrenting is taking place, they will not know what data is being transferred from and to where. It’s a meme, but torrents are actually sometimes used for non-copyright infringing data.

You’re paying for premium, but you’re not paying it to people producing the content you enjoy. You’re paying it to a middle man parasite. Content creators get a tiny fraction of your money.

Paying because they made it deliberately difficult to use without paying is akin to giving the bully your lunch money because it’s better “money value” than standing up for yourself. That’s not something I can do without losing respect for myself.

And my “trying to side step the ads” has so far taken a total of 30 seconds - installing uBlock origin, which I would have done anyway.

Besides, to use premium you need to be logged in. Being logged in Google outside of a contained environment is idiotic if you have a shred of respect for your own privacy.