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Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

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201 points sdsantos | 1 comments | 03 Sep 25 16:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.198s | 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. stordoff ◴[03 Sep 25 18:53 UTC] No.45119220[source]▶
There are various services that do this, e.g. BrightData:

> Bright Data is the World’s Largest Residential Proxy IP Network providing companies the ability to emulate a real user in any country, city or carrier (ASN) in the world. [...] Bright Data has an SDK (software development kit) that is implemented into applications. Bright SDK provides an attractive alternative to advertisements by providing the app user with the choice to opt-in to Bright Data’s network instead. For every user that opts-in to the Bright Data network, Bright Data pays a monthly fee to the application vendor, who passes that value on to the user by not displaying ads.

I haven't heard of any of the VPN providers doing this, but it wouldn't really surprise me.