Protecting yourself when using torrents

Back in the day, when torrents were first taking off, people used the likes of PeerGuardian to make sure that their downloads were not bring spied upon. By all accounts, it worked well.

I've been away from the game for a long time, and I'm curious. What do people use to stop companies from seeing all those Linux distros they're downloading?

I understand PeerGuardian is no longer updated, and I hear people are using proxies these days?

Seems like a bit of a mess - do people still bother?