Residential proxies are a curse. Criminals use them as botnet for DDOS attacks. AI companies pay them to scrape the web for training data in a way that's nigh impossible to block or throttle.
Ipidea operated one of the largest residential proxy networks. Researchers found that Ipidea sold VPN services with "no clear disclosure about turning users' PCs into proxy nodes".
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipidea
Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/js7tql/google_disrupts_large_residential_proxy







