Oh Nord's not bad because pay other people to break into other people's computers but but respect their own customers' privacy?
https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...
https://medium.com/@xianghangmi/resident-evil-understanding-...
But do you have any actual evidence they do so? Having some IPs that show up as residential isn't good enough.
That article doesn't call out any specific VPNs.
"Furthermore, we conducted realtime device fingerprinting when we captured each IP address. And we have successfully identified the device type and vendor information for 547,497 IP addresses. What surprised us is that 237,029 of them turned out to be IoT systems, such as web camera, DVR, and printer."
It includes a direct quote from Nord on page 5 that says they buy access to IPs, and that the individuals they buy from are "fully aware of the purpose and receive a reward for the traffic sent and received".
Even if you think the "fully aware" part is a lie, I don't think there's any reason to think the part about buying it is a lie.
Even the worst version of a VPN buying IPs from some shady dealer is very different from secretly putting data on their own users' connections. It remains quite misleading to write "oxylabs (NordVPN), luminati (Holla)", implying that Nord is doing the same thing as Hola, of turning their own users into proxies.