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Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

(www.opentech.fund)
201 points sdsantos | 1 comments | 03 Sep 25 16:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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vincnetas ◴[03 Sep 25 18:12 UTC] No.45118822[source]▶
How realistic is possibility that some VPN providers use clients (computers of person who installed VPN) to just be able to crawl (or rent crawl infra) sites and make it look like regular residential traffic? (This is speculation i heard somewhere)

Like reverse VPN :) on one side makes client look like he's accessing internet from VPN exit location, and on the other end allowing for money someone to pretend that he's a residential client.

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1. nostrademons ◴[03 Sep 25 18:33 UTC] No.45119022[source]▶
This isn’t VPN providers per se - most want to be able to control their own exit nodes.

There are however a fair number of commercial proxies that do exactly that, sometimes via consumer malware. I know several startup founders who have used them as a way to scrape lots of data and not get banned. Usually the interface they provide to the customer is just a normal SaaS “pay us money and give us a list of URLs and we will give you the page content”, and the interface they provide to the end user is a game or marginally useful utility, and nobody but the company realizes they’re doing something dodgy.