Free Apps Are Quietly Turning Smart TVs Into Web-Scraping Proxies for AI
The iOS SDK that Bright Data incorporates into consumer apps has been reverse-engineered by a researcher, who has revealed how it transforms devices—including always-on smart TVs—into exit nodes that relay web-scraping traffic for a data company that Bright Data heavily pitches to the AI sector.
With over 400 million residential IPs, the firm, which is Luminati's successor, claims to run the world's largest residential proxy network. This SDK, which is distributed within free apps with an opt-in screen and is referred to as a consent-sourced pool of more than 150 million IPs, provides a portion of that supply.
Because the scraping originates from the user's home IP rather than the customer's, the results, which were released on June 5 by Include Security and independent researcher B...