Ethical questions are an important part of all discussions around tech. More and more voices within the global tech community raise a point of the necessity to be careful around ethics of creating, implementing, and utilizing various technologies. Naturally, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who listen to it and decide to put efforts in creating ethical tech solutions.
Infatica, a platform providing businesses with ethically sourced proxies around the world, is one of those companies. It champions transparency which is one of the key features of an ethical business and a cornerstone of trust building within and around any company.
"Today society is pretty well aware of how technology works, including the unethical manipulations and tricks some tech companies and individuals use or may be using. The ethical side of data collecting has been a hot topic for discussions for a while now and searching for ethical solutions is one of the main quests within the industry," Infatica's CEO Vladimir Fomenko says.
Why Data Collection is Important
In our day and age almost every business is data-driven, whether it's about choosing the right time for posting on Instagram or deciding what targeted product improvements are necessary. However, when trying to collect data, companies may encounter geoblocking which prevents them from reaching out to their overseas audiences and competitors and getting the necessary business intelligence.
Geoblocking and other content access restrictions based on geolocation are a problem for business, especially for firms and brands that want to expand globally. For instance, they may stand in the way of a business being able to fully control digital advertising run on a foreign market when it's impossible to have a separate marketing team over there.
Also those obstacles prevent businesses from getting the full picture during competitor analysis when the competitors are local companies on a market in some other country. It makes price formation, marketing strategies creation, and other important things difficult.
Another case of geoblocking harming businesses is when brand protection is required. For example, a company learns that its products are being counterfeited by a firm situated in a different country. Usually, firms producing fakes block access to their websites from countries where the real brand owner resides. It complicates the process of identifying such cases and makes it difficult to take any legal actions against them.
The Problematic Solutions
"Currently, many companies and individuals get around geoblocking by using VPNs and free proxies, but these solutions often aren't ethical. Moreover, they don't provide high-quality data and have a lot of limitations and a slow speed," Fomenko explains.
Probably, everybody who has experience of using VPN services agrees with him. Usually VPNs provide access to a limited list of countries and never to all of them. Connection is rarely fast and may easily break down any moment. Besides, business often needs to be able to reach particular regions within a country, and free proxies and VPNs never grant such opportunities.
However, the biggest problem may be the lack of data protection on the side of these services. It's crucial for business because companies often store sensitive information about their users, like credit card details.
Infatica's Approach
Infatica provides its clients with ethically sourced residential proxies. It means that these proxies are officially assigned to homeowners who are fully aware of their proxies being used. Infatica sources proxies from mobile and desktop devices of real people who get compensated for sharing their IPs.
"When we talk about residential proxies, one of their advantages is that their IPs aren't shared by a lot of users, which is usually the case with data center proxies. It means that residential proxy users aren't easy to detect", Fomenko goes deeper into explaining the mechanisms behind Infatica's solution.
Proxies are a completely legal way to alter your IP address, and it's a popular tool among many companies. Today Infatica provides a lot of proxies around the world, including geolocations in the US, Germany, Turkey, India, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. It's no less important that Infatica takes care of data protection for its users. Their data is encrypted end-to-end and can't be accessed by any third parties.
"Another major Infatica's feature is smart rotation which helps to keep our IPs out of any black lists. We also have a rather strict anti-abuse policy because we want to be a provider which is both reliable and ethical. We don't want to compromise our company and our clients' businesses", Fomenko adds.
Infatica's clients already use the service to manage social media in various regions, collect vital marketing data, build price aggregation platforms, research overseas target audiences,ensure corporate data protection and overall cybersecurity, and other purposes. In promoting ethical data collecting, the company goes as far as sharing educational information about it in its blog.
It's an encouraging sign that there are more and more tech companies that care about bringing ethical solutions to the market. Infatica is a proper example of such a company, it brings transparency to the data collection industry while being able to address very specific needs of its clients.
