Let’s clear a common misconception right away: a proxy is not a privacy tool by default. It’s a routing mechanism, and its trustworthiness depends entirely on where it sits in the network topology and how it handles metadata. When engineers choose between residential and datacenter proxies for web scraping, they’re not deciding between “safe” and “unsafe,” but between two fundamentally different architectures with unique fingerprint surfaces, latency profiles, and resistance to detection.
