The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy
The work at Include Security has us working with AI day in and day out (hacking it, using it, training it, etc).
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. We’ll document what you, the average user, should know about what this company’s SDK does on your systems such as your mobile phone and your smart TV. We’re going to explore how their SDK works, which platforms have shipped it, and why your Internet-connected TV is the ultimate proxy for AI models looking to train on data scraped from the Internet.
AI companies depend on web-scraped content: for pre-training, for retrieval, for agent grounding, for search. But the modern web isn’t scrapeable from a datacenter. Cloudflare, DataDome, HUMAN , among others throttle or block requests from known cloud IPs.
The workaround is residential proxies. A scraping job routed through a Comcast or T-Mobile subscriber’s connection arrives at the target site from an IP that belongs to a paying residential customer. Krebs reported in October 2025 that “a glut of proxies from Aisuru and other sources is fueling large-scale data harvesting efforts tied to various AI projects.” Academic measurement going back to 2019 shows these networks are overwhelmingly misused. The FBI issued a formal advisory earlier this year.
Most of the existing press has focused on the illegal residential-proxy supply: botnets ( Aisuru , Kimwolf ), trojanized apps ( HUMAN Security’s PROXYLIB disclosure ), pre-infected IoT hardware ( Google/Mandiant’s IPIDEA takedown ). These are the bad actors.