Residential Proxies Are a National Security Threat | Hacker News

Hacker News users debated whether residential proxies for web scraping are a national security threat or just a legitimate way to access public data.

The discussion centered on anti-scraping defenses, who owns public web data, and whether blocking scraping is anti-competitive.

Commenters also pointed to use cases like price comparison sites and AI training, while others questioned the ethics and legality of large-scale scraping.

The thread highlights the growing tension between platform control, consumer benefit, and security concerns as scraping faces more technical and legal pushback.