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.
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, and the probe-pipeline methodology. 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:
