The ethics of these free VPNs and hidden proxy SDKs are very questionable. But they are crazy profitable for the proxy providers running them so unlikely to go away.

Did a teardown on their crazy economics recently https://scrapeops.io/web-scraping-playbook/residential-mobil...

The profit margins are insane, easily over 99% profit on millions in revenue.

In my new house, Xfinity offers huge discounts if you let them manage the network.

Are they reselling that bandwidth, mining my data, monitoring my traffic, or all of the above?

>Hola is a freemium web and mobile application...

When the service is free, you are the product.

Yeah, but you can pay to be the product, too.

Bright Data operates a service where you agree to allow your network to be used in their proxy system. In return, they give you a small amount of money per gigabyte of traffic. https://earnapp.com/

This sounds too good to be true.

There is a community of people who use these passive income apps for some pocket money. It's not too good to be true, but they pay you so little compared to how much they make from you. For example, they pay $0.60/GB for united states traffic, and charge approx $15.00/GB for residential proxy use on the Bright Data network.

The problem is their proxy backdoor thing is part of an SDK used by other applications/games/etc., both free and paid.

I mentioned this SDK, EarnApp, in my other comment. I am a shady web scraper that uses these services when necessary. The real answer is, STOP USING IP addresses for reputation scanning. With ipv4 exhaustion and CGN, this is an inevitable outcome anyways.

according to Hola tos you agree to make your device a proxy accessible to everyone else using the service