Hey babe, new capitalism update just dropped
Hi all,
I have just seen the greatest convergence of Web3/Blockchain/Crypto and AI - Grass. It appears to be a cryptocurrency that pays you for running a residential proxy on your local internet for AI companies to scrape the internet from "your perspective" (location) by installing a browser extension.
It was a while ago that I actually stumbled across it but this paragraph has just stuck with me
The funny thing is it seems like they're testing the waters because they can't decide whether they're bundling up the data to sell or whether they're offering a residential proxy.
Residential proxies always seem like a bit of a dangerous game to me as you're literally letting someone inside your network but what do I know, I'm sure they've taken all the necessary precautions to keep their users safe.
I'm just hoping this is not a way for AI companies to avoid blocks that people are placing on their IPs and robots by using home connections which don't have a robot name and a means of avoiding robots.txt while looking legit, but the cynical side of me thinks it might just be - because otherwise why pay for this expensive data when you could just use a server instead.
I also think it might be a pain for the users running it, because surely it means they'll see more captchas from all the weird activity coming from their network - but maybe it's a trickle.
Either way, have a lovely day and thanks for reading.