Brightdata is formerly known as as Luminati who is owned by same company as Hola VPN.

Similarly NordVPN owns Oxylabs (who mostly hack routers and cameras and sell those as residential IP’s).

But they have a white paper on how ethical their proxies are! https://oxylabs.io/Oxylabs_Residential_Proxy_Acquisition_Han...

I never checked their business practice. But I use Luminati rotating residential proxies for a lot of my scraping work.

Mostly to avoid hitting 'ddos protections' or other security bullshit that doesn't really make sense on 1 daily request or so.

This is really bad. Imagine if someone plants these proxy inside app how user are even going to know? I think every OS should come with firewall so if app tries to make connection it should prompt with Accept | Accept Forever | Deny | Deny Forever.

I think these companies used to go for extension developer now it seems they have found new idea to implant malware on apps which is not easy to detect.

This is EXACTLY how mobile proxy companies like Luminati and OxyLabs acquire their ip address pool. They pay devs to embed a lib inside their app.

They hack IP cams and routers too…