Is port forwarding private / anonymous?

[isportforwardingsafe 0]

Does using P2P with port forwarding compromise anonymity? What if there's a complaint on the specific port? Are ports shared? Does staff know which user has which port?

[OpenSourcerer 1410]

5 hours ago, isportforwardingsafe said:

What if there's a complaint on the specific port?

I've heard this question in the past.. there are only 65535 ports one can use, so using it to identify someone across servers is quite a fool's errand.
 

5 hours ago, isportforwardingsafe said:

Are ports shared?

Think about it. If two clients forwarded the same port and connect to two different servers, for one of those clients the forwarding wouldn't work at all. So of course ports are not shared, only the exit IP addresses.
 

5 hours ago, isportforwardingsafe said:

Does staff know which user has which port?

I think it's known, yes. It was possible to free up ports in the past.

[NaDre 156]

13 hours ago, isportforwardingsafe said:

...
Does staff know which user has which port?

Of course. They have to know what ports to forward when you connect to a server.

They have said in the past that they do not keep history. Once you change to another port, the record is gone.

P2P trolls can't act instantly. So if you are concerned, change the port every few days.

I think the advantage of being connectable far outweighs any risk. Often on old torrents, none of the seeders are connectable. So if you're not connectable either, you are out of luck. If you are really paranoid, you could just make yourself connectable while you download ("download" in the torrent sense).

Also, I think a complaint would have to specify an earlier date and time. I don't think AirVPN keeps a record of how long you have had a port reserved. They only know what is reserved now. So they could not actually provide the requested information. And they could say that in their response.