Grey market residential proxy service providers are one of the most common methods of implementing bot spam, social media manipulation and plenty of straight-out fraud.

There's all kinds of things that malicious actors want to do where they value coming from an ordinary (comcast, charter, centurylink, shaw cable, whatever) residential IP.

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cognitiveinline 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You make a good point. I've reassessed and agree this is shady, and not a good pattern. And should be disabled/abolished.

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hokumguru 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, some of us have legitimate business needs to get past cloudflares frankly somewhat bs gatekeeping business model, however

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walrus01 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, I do as well, I have my own VPN into my home office that lets me run traffic outbound through its default gateway while I'm somewhere else. But letting random third parties I don't know run traffic through my house is another thing entirely.

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nikanj 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

To be clear, bot spam and social media manipulation are legitimate business needs for the business selling said services.

	▲	JoshTriplett 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You can't have legitimate business needs if you're not a legitimate business in the first place. Ban them all.

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charcircuit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just because others abuse privacy doesn't mean that we should remove privacy from everyone else. They also let you get around geoblocking.

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nvme0n1p1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You're free to let strangers download illegal images from a proxy running on your IP, but I sure as hell won't.

	▲	charcircuit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you don't want to share your internet with others, that is your choice, but please don't make seem like you are only sharing the internet with criminals. That is a harmful belief to spread.