Comment by xp84
Comment by xp84 8 hours ago
Just because something can be used for sketchy purposes doesn't mean that's the only purpose of it. there are thousands of situations where people are forced to interact with a shitty website 100x per day and the site won't provide an api. Imagine if your job was booking plane tickets all day. United could provide you an API key to do so via an API, but in practice they won't, only some enterprisey travel software company can get that kind of access, for a steep fee. You could build a tool which automatically puts together an itinerary based on rules and books it, through a tool like this. Perhaps a slightly contrived example but I believe things like this definitely happen.
A very common and pro-consumer use for residential proxies is price scraping and price comparisons.
Most businesses don't want to compete on price and are extremely unhappy if you tell people that their competition sells the same stuff but for less, that their "best deal of the month" is actually a price raise, or that they significantly raise toilet paper prices every time there's a natural disaster.