... less legally solid? What?

Residential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.

In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.

The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.

That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.

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nekusar an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".

If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.

To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.

	▲	hypfer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That was not the question. There are many factors driving crime, yes. The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist. But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.

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itintheory 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, that's why they sanitize the User-Ggent header when using these proxies. Good luck attributing the scraping to anyone at all.

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hypfer 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

It just needs one case where someone manages to attribute it to the corp using these illicit services.

Either by technical means or by a whistleblower.

Which might be a gamble worth doing, but also might not. And regardless, the fact that it is a gamble alone slows down velocity.

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geraldwhen 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

If the content is legally obtainable, couldn’t any employee use their own home network to pull data? I don’t think anyone would bother with a resi. Employees have their own network connections available.

	▲	hypfer 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Can you people please for the love of God stop missing the bigger picture? Yes, yes there is always something. Yes there can always be workarounds. But that is not the point. The point is that things are made harder. That is the point. To make things harder Not impossible. Harder Jesus Christ. It's all just a game of probabilities and friction. One needs to understand that to understand reality.