Peer-to-peer proxy doesn’t mean a botnet, at least not how I think most people think that to mean. Rather they are routing traffic through residential IPs for a number of customers. $25-45/1000 users sounds exactly within the margins of a VPN provider (they even mention hola.org in the 3rd email, which is $2.99/m per ‘premium’ user or free if you become a node in the network) and residential proxies are also commonly used for scraping and other IP-sensitive work, again within those margins.
I didn’t find the code sample to be obfuscated, it was actually quite clear. It establishes a web socket with a server and simply passes requests through an endpoint, I.e. literally just a proxy.
All that said, it’s definitely shady to put this in your extension without users knowing. But, if you need to monetize something free, and make at least a good effort to inform users or allow them to opt out, and we trust infatica doesn’t allow illegal use of its proxy network, then I don’t really see the problem.
There’s a real need for residential IPs, no market to give each user $.025 and I can’t really fault someone for making a business out of this.
Edit: I also find irony that the author labels datos.live a “scammer” when in fact they are a very legitimate business engaged in similar data collection to what Google already does. ...The same author who published an extension (in the Chrome Store) for YouTube