How Databay earns trust
Every claim this site makes - "ethically sourced", "verified every 5 minutes", "99.9%+ uptime" - should be checkable. This page is where we substantiate them: how residential IPs enter the network, how our research is produced, who does the work, and where the independent signals live.
IP Sourcing Ethics & Consent Model
Every residential IP in the Databay network comes from a real person who chose to share bandwidth. The supply chain is an opt-in partner-app flow: a user installs an application that includes the Databay SDK, and before any traffic is routed they see a consent screen written in plain language - not buried in a EULA - that explains exactly what sharing means: idle bandwidth on their connection may carry third-party requests while the app is running.
Participation is paid. Users earn real money per gigabyte shared, not promotional credit or vague "premium features". We consider payment a load-bearing part of the ethics: a person who is compensated for a clearly described service is a supplier, not a product. We do not source IPs from malware, rootkits, hidden installers, or SDKs that activate without a visible consent step.
Consent is revocable at any time. Closing or uninstalling the partner app removes the device from the pool; there is no lingering background agent and no penalty for leaving. Pool membership therefore fluctuates naturally - that churn is the cost of doing this honestly.
The demand side is policed too. Customers agree to the Acceptable Use Policy before they can place an order; it explicitly bars credential stuffing, fraud, piracy, CSAM and a long tail of other abuse patterns. Abuse reports go to a human-monitored Trust & Safety inbox, and accounts that route abusive traffic through volunteers' connections are terminated. This page is the long-form explanation behind every "ethically sourced" claim elsewhere on the site.
First-Party Research
We publish original measurements, not aggregated marketing claims. The centerpiece is our residential IP reputation study: we took 1,000 residential IPs across 25 of the world's largest residential ASNs and ran every one of them through six free IP-reputation databases, plus a Cloudflare-Free cross-verification origin.
The malice-focused feeds (Tor exit list, Spamhaus DROP, ASN-drop) flagged none of the sample; Spamhaus ZEN listings were dominated by PBL policy codes - the "this is a residential line" designation, not a malice verdict. The raw, /24-redacted dataset is downloadable: residential-ip-reputation-2026-05.csv. Verify our numbers yourself.
The same open-methodology standard applies to the free proxy list: every entry is re-probed every 5 minutes, stale entries are dropped rather than left to inflate counts, and the full pipeline is documented in the free proxy list methodology post and mirrored open-source on GitHub.
The Databay Research Team
Content on this site is researched, written and maintained by the Databay Research Team - the engineering group that operates the proxy network itself. The people who run the probe pipelines, the reputation scans and the free-proxy dataset are the same people who write the guides about them. We publish as a team rather than under individual bylines, and we put the methodology where anyone can audit it instead of putting a face where no one can.
The team's working output is public: the technical guides, the IP-reputation study, the probe-pipeline methodology, and the open-source databay-labs repositories. Judge the work, not a headshot.
Network Status
We publish real-time network health at status.databay.com - uptime, incident history and per-service availability. The network targets 99.9%+ uptime; the status page is where that figure is continuously kept honest.
Compliance & Policies
Nothing is gated behind a sales call - the complete policy set is published:
- Acceptable Use Policy - what customers may and may not do with the network.
- AML Policy and KYC Policy - anti-money-laundering and customer-verification stance.
- Refund Policy - in plain terms, before you buy.
- Report abuse - a human-monitored Trust & Safety inbox, not a triage queue.
- All legal documents - terms, privacy, SLA and the rest.
Independent Signals
Don't take our word for any of this - the third-party surfaces are linked directly, unfiltered:
