There’s an old saying the real estate business is all about location, location, and location.

Today, we’d probably say that all business is about data, data, and data.

Like every other internet user, you are part of this paradigm!

That probably isn’t a surprise. If you’re like most VPN or proxy users, you care about protecting your data, not being cut off from the data you want to access, or both.

But it’s not just people like you using VPNs and proxies. There is a whole ecosystem of businesses that want do what you are doing — just on a much larger scale.

But not all of these businesses can do so as well as they would like. There’s a pecking order, and the biggest players don’t always want to share access to the data they have.

Can you blame them? Data is their most valuable asset.

Big tech players don’t play nice with smaller tech players.

For example, one business let’s call Acme might want to gather intelligence on the prices a competitor (we’ll call Bonanza) is charging to customers from different geographical areas, as determined by their IP addresses.

Google already knows these price differences because they have built the infrastructure to identify them — or might even be serving the web ads with the different prices for both Acme and Bonanza.

Google doesn’t really have an incentive to give all this information to Acme. Google wants to sell Acme web advertising — not pricing data.

And not only that. Google might actively shut down attempts by Acme to find this data. If Acme might try to use IPs in different jurisdictions to research sales prices, Google often blocks these attempts. Assuming, of course, that Google can identify the IP address that Acme is using.

This “data war” is being waged every day on the interwebs!

Here are a few predictions about it moving forward:

Prediction #1: Artificial intelligence and big data analytics are going to make VPNs less effective for the large-scale data scraping that businesses need.

For big players like Google — or even Netflix, as we’ve written about before — the identification of VPN usage is basically a numbers game. They might not be able to see what is passing through an encrypted VPN tunnel, but they can see the external indicators that the tunnel is there. And if there are enough indicators, then they will simply block the connection.

Of course, artificially intelligent computer programs are extremely good at playing numbers games like this, i.e. identifying the large-scale digital fingerprints that enterprise-level data scraping creates.

As AI capabilities continue to develop, we believe they will push VPN services towards obsolescence — especially for business users.

Prediction #2: As VPNs become less effective, businesses will increasingly rely on residential proxy networks.

We’ve already written about how residential proxies are your best tool for private web browsing.

The same principles apply to business users. Again, though, the scale is larger.

Residential proxy networks won’t just be the best way for businesses to acquire the data they need — they’ll be the only way for them to do so!

With hprox, you can get ahead of this trend and earn some money in the process!

Hprox is the only residential private network that pays its IP providers.

VPNs aren’t going to disappear tomorrow. You — and businesses — should be able to use them more or less successfully for the near future.

But at some point you’re going to start having to switch VPN providers more often to be able to do the things you want. And you can be sure that businesses will be experiencing similar headaches.

That’s when businesses are going to start wanting to use your IP address to gather the data they need. In fact some of them already do — and are happy to pay for the privilege.

With hprox, the majority of those funds will come your way. For data passing through their internet connections, we pay IP providers in BST, the crypto coin from the BlockStamp blockchain.

So get in early! Download the application from our website and join the network to start browsing privately — and earning some money along the way.

This war for online data is one you can profit from with a clear conscience :)