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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Users are OK with acting as proxies because they don't understand all the shady stuff their proxy is being used for. Also consumer ISPs generally ban this.

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But then would you make the same arguments for running a tor node (presumably, you don't know what shady stuff is there, but you know there's shady stuff)?

Running a tor node is pretty stupid from a liability perspective, but at least you have more deniability and you are making an informed choice.

These residential proxies are pretty much universally shady. I doubt most of the users understand what they are consenting to.

tor nodes are zero risk as long as they're not an exit

been running nodes since 2017 on two providers and zero issues

yes, but i was likening being part of the proxy network to being a tor exit node. I should've made my comment clearer.

Personally I consider Tor less shady than these residential proxy networks because Tor has some normal users but yes, the considerations are similar. (I ran one of the earliest Tor exit nodes.)

That's totally something you should consider, even if you decide for running the tor node anyway in the end.

You could say the same about google’s terms of service.

A thousand times yes.

Why would the users care either way?

Some people care about ethics, and try to avoid doing bad stuff, or helping the bad stuff.

Sure, but that only answers why some users might care.

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