> My point is that this term has been used so loosely, it has lost its meaning.
Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".
Bright Data's business is legal, but they could be subpoenaed to find out which customer is making these requests, but first you would have to prove they were actually involved, because there are many residential proxy providers.
If there was a way of detecting the proxy SDKs, it would be a simple matter of banning the device. Or at least naming and shaming the apps that use them.
I'm sure there are ways of detecting residential proxy clients that are reasonably effective. I'm equally sure that the people in possession of those techniques (thinking CDN providers, big social networks with public links, newsrooms) are unlikely to share their secret sauce in public. Doing that loses a competitive edge in cost-of-hosting, and as soon as you go public the residential proxy makers can adapt.
There's JA4 fingerprinting (and the JA4+ suite), but still not a surefire way of detecting. Plus the metadata for the signatures has to be constantly maintained and updated.
Have you taken a look at X/Twitter lately? There is a lot of out and out racism. Don't give the benefit of the doubt that it's just people who want "border control".
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