I'd say say at least use a VPN. Most of the suggested security practices are easy enough there's really no reason not to...

I just don't care about any of that at all. I have around 100TB of seeding accumulated over the years, no VPN, zero security measures, nothing ever happened at all.

I've personally been doing this for many years, seeding all sorts of nasty stuff and no one that I know has ever gotten so much as an email.

Feel free to use no privacy measures, but at least setup an alert so you know if your country's police decides to start persecuting pirates.

I recommend u setup a Google alert with a query like "YOUR-COUNTRY-HERE arrestan pirateria". So if a news article that matches that query ever gets posted online, you'll instantly get an email

In Chile I recall Microsoft sending a notification to my former worplace because someone used torrent to download a game from inside the company network. That person didn't notice that all traffic was being routed to company's VPN hosted in MS Azure.

ISPs don't give a shit. The goverment has laws against piracy that are never applied (you know: Southamerica, the lawlessness). But gringo companies do care.

My advice is to avoid Google, MS and the big tech to follow your pirates activities. They may suspend services to you, or notifiy some local authority.

Use a different browser or machine for your big tech interactions, and you'll be fine.

Edit: typos.

I'm in the UK and while they make big talk of punishing cyber criminals I've never received as much as a cease and desist from an ISP despite running what is essentially a 24/7 seedbox from my home server for watching stuff via Plex

Be ware of using VPN if you want spanish content and wanna join a private tracker; all spanish private tracker ban the use of VPNs

My advice is to check if your ISP is blocking you from access to the sites you plan to use and pick one that doesn’t. If you plan to use torrent check if your ISP is outside CG-NAT (or let’s you leave it) to enable port forwarding

If your country doesn’t care about piracy do not complicate your life further till they care, just stay up to date. As for measures I always use independantly of context, I just recommend using

• Firefox with uBlock Origin and NoScript
• Bitwarden or other password manager
• A email relay services such as iCloud private relay or Duck email proxy
• Flee of companies that sell your data, such as Google, Meta, Tiktok, etc

what is the bare minimum of security measures you can do?

I guess just the normal things with p2p stuff: make sure no ports are exposed except for the essentials, update software, use SSL wherever possible.

When you don't use VPN, people will see your actual IP adress and will launch the same kind of attacks, they also launch on servers [1] to try to hijack your system and add them to their bot net.

[1] port scans, login-attemps, applying known exploits. If this doesn't sound scary, you should try operating a server that is exposed on the internet and then look at the number of login attemps.

If they don't care, you don't need security.

Custom DNS and VPN, more secure would be Tor but its not everyday use fast.