Why BitTorrent is selling itself like potato chips

BitTorrent -- perhaps best known in the tech world for providing the Internet plumbing for Pirate Bay, a notorious site frequently used to illegally share copyrighted material -- is now making a play for the mainstream.

Travelers on both coasts are being greeted by BitTorrent ads that are in line with traditional Madison Avenue marketing: "Your Data Belongs to You," reads one such billboard on New York City's TriBeCa neighborhood. Reads another, in San Francisco's SoMa, "People > Servers," using the mathematical symbol for "greater than."

More than a dozen years after getting its start as a grad school project, BitTorrent is making a push to sell itself to a mainstream audience, in light of the growing interest in law enforcement cellphone tracking, the recent Supreme Court case over who owns user data, even Anonymous's hacking efforts.