Minutes after sharing a file this morning, I received an email from my Internet Service Provider, Xfinity, saying they received a "Copyright Violation Notice" that someone downloaded a copyrighted video from me (citing the exact filename) and asked me to delete the file.

I've NEVER received a notice like this before and it is concerning that Xfinity might be monitoring my traffic (down to the filenames.)

Is this new or am I only just now learning of something ISP's have been doing for years?

The ISP only relays the notice to you. There exist spy networks on Bittorrents DHT that will find you to report you (D M C A infringement scare mails). The ISPs are not doing it themselves.

Your only choice is to stop infringing rights of copyright holders, which appears to be illegal in the U.S. jurisdiction last I checked.

Nevertheless, for your privacy there exist the following options:

- search these forums to enable selective block lists (some will be outdated, but I personally suggest to block big cloud providers wholesale like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Linode, Softlayer (aka IBM Cloud). This only helps to reduce the level of privacy invasion and wasted traffic for when you share unencumbered content.
- use a VPN server from countries like Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland. Don't use your own country. Mexico is better than Canada but I believe both are better than making a server hosted in your own country a target
- the chosen VPN provider must allow port-forwarding
- correctly configure Tixati to only ever use the connection established by VPN, so packets never go through your real internet connection (interface binding)

I will stop replying if anybody insinuates anything other than what I mentioned above.

Truly yours,
notaLamer

If I recall correctly in cases like this generally the copyright holder or their representative was connected to the torrent and monitoring the IPs of all peers/seeds; they then send a notice to your ISP. The quick turn-around is suspicious and maybe isps started ratting on their own customers and I didn't hear.

DTH spiders in disguise and other ip numbers hanging in most or all your active torrents are ai monitoring tools I assume. Automatic sueing might be next. Robojudge next level. Why isn't I2P used more? I see a few dozen users, a megabyte transfers per day having almost a petabyte online.