But since you brought it up, we both know residential proxies are especially attractive to bad actors and circumventors.
It's like how we're both capable of pitching Tor as the emancipator of the sanctioned journalist trying to publish the truth in the face of mortal danger. Yet 99% of Tor traffic to my websites is malicious despite our feel-good hypotheticals.
Of course, residential proxies are even better than Tor because a network can't just block the residential IP address space. ;)
> It's like how we're both capable of pitching Tor as the emancipator of the sanctioned journalist trying to publish the truth in the face of mortal danger. Yet 99% of Tor traffic to my websites is malicious despite our feel-good hypotheticals.
Of course. That's the reality of freedom on the radical edges — bad actors need it more than pro-social actors. Many of us choose to support radical freedom(s) anyway because the capacity for anyone to act* freely is judged to outweigh the negative effects from bad actors.
*browse, post, etc.
VPNs are often used for piracy, SPAM, and other nefarious purposes while residential proxies are primarily used to obtain access to data through web scraping. Large companies like Google are able to scrape the same sites without getting blocked already, and proxies help to level the playing field between innovative startups and established players. I can certainly understand the critique, but I strongly believe that the existence of residential proxies results in a lot more good than evil.
[1] - https://intoli.com