Free VPNs reselling user bandwidth

VPN
1

How common is it for VPNs to route traffic through your IP address?

There’s a terms and conditions for one VPN provider about this:

Your use of ___ VPN is free, in return for allowing web indexing by Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and IP address to download public web data from the internet.

Bright Data sells “residential proxies”, basically the bandwidth of the VPN’s users to companies who want to do things like scraping the prices from a competitor’s website.

I wondered if this happens a lot with other VPNs and if it’s something to look out for.

2

If something is free, you are the product.

3

FYI it’s not just VPNs. Smart TVs do it also if you download certain apps. Such as LG’s webOS has Bright Data apps that do the same thing: use the TV’s internet connection and IP address to run the traffic of their VPN customers.

4

There are SDKs for those, as in, anyone can write a thin wrapper (or just reuse their template) for such a network and upload it as yet another VPN.

5

I know, but it’s interesting seeing the ways that it actually plays out

6

or it just a demo. ---- is a good example. 3 (i didnt used the free tier for like a year now, that was all the free servers) server can be used but if you want more location and higher bandwith ect. u need to pay for premium. didnt sell your data but instead premium users pay for free users