[armchairhacker]

Residential proxies are necessary to access services that try to ban VPNs without compromising anonymity. If they’re banned, it’s easier for websites to require information that can be used to track you (IP address), since most people don’t use VPNs they won’t care.

More importantly, a residential proxy can be mutual. If a group of people agree to forward traffic to each others’ IP, how is it not their business? It obfuscates their identities, but this is the Internet, not e.g. a government office or test center where you obviously can’t walk in with someone else’s ID.

Banning non-consensual proxies makes sense since those are effectively malware, even though they make anonymity harder, so does banning theft and here you’re stealing someone’s internet. I’m sure we can convince enough laymen to knowingly install proxies by paying them.

[BLKNSLVR]

I think the fact that they're laymen means that there's still a pocket of non-consensuality. Taking advantage of someone's ignorance of potential consequences is as bad as malware in my opinion. If you're outlining all the potential bad outcomes before signing up a 'mark', then that's slightly more OK.

Myself being "not a layman" would definitely not allow anonymous usage of Internet that's tied to my home/residence/identity to be used by some internet rando just because they pay me money.

I would support, however, small family/friends groups who know and trust each other well enough to not do anything that'll cause a police raid on each others homes (having endured a police raid and the ensuing 8 months of not being told anything about the progress of whatever they're doing, it's not something I'd wish on a stranger, never mind a friend/family member).

[armchairhacker]

> Taking advantage of someone's ignorance of potential consequences is as bad as malware in my opinion. If you're outlining all the potential bad outcomes before signing up a 'mark', then that's slightly more OK.

Sure, the service should be upfront, although most laymen probably won't read. But if people had to really understand consequences before they accepted anything, most would miss out on most overall mutual offers. Importantly, the expected consequences are low (as long as the service isn't greedy), and the ratio of tech people agreeing would suggest that if most laymen did understand they would still.

[BLKNSLVR]

> the ratio of tech people agreeing

Do we have solid numbers for that?