We’re all aware of the community-level opposition happening against datacenters, aimed at improving AI capabilities, being built recently. What you might not be aware of are the distributed efforts to train AI that could be using the devices inside your home.

In this post, we’re going to explore how the company Bright Data facilitates modern AI models scraping training data from the Internet using its residential proxy network.

Bright Data is a data-collection company that sells access to what it markets as the world’s largest residential proxy network of 400M+ home IP addresses that its customers route web-scraping traffic through. The supply behind that network comes from an SDK: a piece of software embedded in consumer apps that, with the user’s consent, turns their phone or smart TV into one of those exit nodes.