This is nasty in other ways too. What happens when someone uses these B2P residential proxies to commit crimes that get traced back to you?

Anything incorporating anything like this is malware.

Are ad blockers like AdBlock, uBlock effective against these?

I'd expect this to be against app store and google play rules, they are very picky.

I think tech can still be beautiful in a less grandiose and "omniparadisical" way than people used to dream of. "A wide open internet, free as in speech this, free as in beer that, open source wonders, open gardens..." Well, there are a lot of incentives that fight that, and game theory wins. Maybe we download software dependencies from our friends, the ones we actually trust. Maybe we write more code ourselves--more homesteading families that raise their own chickens, jar their own pickled carrots, and code their own networking utilities. Maybe we operate on servers we own, or our friends own, and we don't get blindsided by news that the platforms are selling our data and scraping it for training.

Maybe it's less convenient and more expensive and onerous. Do good things require hard work? Or did we expect everyone to ignore incentives forever while the trillion-dollar hyperscalers fought for an open and noble internet and then wrapped it in affordable consumer products to our delight?

It reminds me of the post here a few weeks ago about how Netflix used to be good and "maybe I want a faster horse" - we want things to be built for us, easily, cheaply, conveniently, by companies, and we want those companies not to succumb to enshittification - but somehow when the companies just follow the game theory and turn everything into a TikToky neural-networks-maximizing-engagement-infinite-scroll-experience, it's their fault, and not ours for going with the easy path while hoping the corporations would not take the easy path.

do you think there’s a realistic path forward for better transparency or detection—maybe at the OS level or through network-level anomaly detection?

How is this not just illegal? Surely there’s something in GDPR that makes this not allowed.

I’m really struggling to understand how this is different than malware we’ve had forever. Can someone explain what’s novel about this?

Its a fair point but very dynamic to sort out. This needs a full research team to figure out. Or you know.. all of us combined!! It is definitely a problem.

TINFOIL: Sometimes I always wondered if Azure or AWS used bots to push site traffic hits to generate money... they know you are hosted with them.. They have your info.. Send out bots to drive micro accumulation. Slow boil..

"Peer-to-business network"! Amazing. uBlock Origin gets rid of this, right?

>Apple, Microsoft and Google should act.

Do nothing, win.

They are the primary benefactors buying this data since they are the largest AI players.