Where the addresses come from
Every residential proxy address you buy belongs to somebody's home internet connection. This section is about how providers get them, what the household was told, and what happens when that answer turns out to be a problem. 21 of the 35 proxy sellers we track will not say. Scraping APIs are not counted here: they resell requests rather than a residential pool, so the question does not apply to them.
No page in this section carries an affiliate link, ever. That is the only way an argument about consent is worth reading from a site that earns commission.
Are residential proxies legal?
Buying and using residential proxies is legal in most places. What varies is how the IP owner consented and what you do with the connection.
How residential proxies actually work
Your request exits through somebody's home internet connection. Here is the full path, who the household is, and why the pool size number is soft.
Bundled SDK or paid app: what the household actually agreed to
The two ways residential proxy networks recruit household connections, what the person on the other end was told, and what they got for it.
Where residential proxy IP addresses actually come from
Every residential proxy address is somebody's home connection. Who they are, what they were offered, and what the providers we track disclose.
What regulators and prosecutors have actually done
Every seizure, fine and sourcing disclosure we hold a record for, with the date and the primary source. Generated from our vendor records.
What the 42 providers we track disclose
| Bundled SDK8/42 | Webshare, Decodo, SOAX, Oxylabs, Bright Data, NodeMaven, Massive, Infatica |
| Paid app4/42 | IPRoyal, DataImpulse, PacketStream, ProxyRack |
| Datacenter2/42 | Rayobyte, PrivateProxy |
| They do not say28/42 | Mangoproxy, RapidProxy, Proxidize, Swiftproxy, NiuProxy, Proxy-Seller, ProxyScrape, Geonode, 9Proxy, Storm Proxies, Shifter, Evomi, IPBurger, ASocks, Proxy-Cheap, Thordata, ProxyEmpire, Froxy, Pia S5 Proxy, Gonzo Proxy, Crawlbase, Firecrawl, ScraperAPI, Scrapfly, ScrapingBee, ZenRows, Fleetproxy, SearchApi |
“They do not say” is a finding, not a missing value, it means the provider publishes no statement, not that we did not look.