Free Apps Turn Smart TVs into Web-Scraping Proxies for AI

Bright Data's iOS SDK embedded in free apps quietly turns devices, including smart TVs, into exit nodes for web-scraping traffic. The SDK, shipped in apps behind an opt-in screen, uses a consent-sourced pool of 150 million-plus IPs. Scraping comes from the user's home IP, not the customer's, posing a risk to home connections and bandwidth. The researcher found the peer channel carrying scraping jobs has no real authentication and bypasses VPNs on iOS.