What are residential proxies? Are they legal?
There are various types of proxy servers in the market. Residential proxies are one of the types that can help individuals gain more anonymity online and provide businesses with a more competitive edge. But how do residential and other types of proxies work? Are they legal? And more importantly, which one should you choose?
What are residential proxies? Residential proxies can be described as a huge, web-like network of real IP addresses provided by internet service providers (ISPs). The residential proxy network allows you to use its IP addresses and protect yourself on the web. The IP addresses are usually attached to physical locations and composed of networks of various sizes. These physical locations can be as small as your local area or as large as the whole world.
How do residential proxies work? Think of residential proxy servers as intermediaries between all the devices and the websites you can connect to. These mediators can help you stay anonymous and not expose your identity or location when you surf the web. In other words, it borrows someone else’s IP address from the proxy pool and makes it yours, so you can become anyone from anywhere in the world. Cool, right?
Main residential IP address use cases Residential IP addresses have multiple uses. Some people use residential proxies for good intentions, while unfortunately, others use them for illegal purposes.
Social media management. There is no doubt that social media is an integral part of online marketing today and vice versa. Residential proxies open up the possibility of having multiple social media accounts on one device and managing them successfully. Market price monitoring. If your business relies on customers, residential proxies will come in handy. You can easily collect data, monitor and follow pricing trends, all for the sake of making your customers come back. Overall, residential proxies allow you to use different sales intelligence software. Web security penetration testing. Web security companies use different encryption techniques to hide IP addresses, and residential proxies are one of them. Web security penetration testing recreates realistic scenarios and methods that cybercriminals use on a daily basis. Web data scraping. Companies use residential proxies for data collection and competitor monitoring. Since the IP addresses can be rotated continuously, a large amount of information can be collected. Ad verification. Residential proxies play a significant role in media monitoring, as they allow you to check and verify the ads displayed on the pages. This means identifying and blocking suspicious ads that could harm your business reputation. Website unlocking. Many service providers geolock content and websites, making them accessible only from certain parts of the world. Residential proxies allow you to contact them while traveling without being flagged or blocked. In countries where access to information is restricted, residential proxies play a huge role.
