Introduction
Honeygain is a platform designed to share your internet bandwidth for a reward. They offer a decent amount of money for running their applications on your devices. The application runs in the background and allow Honeygain to use your internet connection.
The whole idea is quite smart and it is similar to the TOR onion routers or similar solutions. However, there is also a dark side of this business.
Who and why needs your IP address?
This is the first issue you should think about. Legit internet users do not need it at all. Does it mean that only criminals will use your connection? It is hard to say. But for sure we can conclude that your connection would not be used for a good purpose. In the best case, your connection will be used for abusing the terms and conditions of other services. For example: generating fake traffic, fake ads viewing, access to services from blacklisted and banned places. All of that is terribly bad.
Possible risks for you
Now you know, only not really nice people want to use your network via Honeygain. What does it mean for you? Because you are the endpoint, it pretty much makes you responsible for their actions. The statement of Honeygain about this is quite clear. See their terms and conditions for answer: it is the user who is responsible for its ability to share internet traffic and his compliance with local laws, regulations and agreements with third parties. I would strongly recommend to read the whole terms and conditions.
What could be the possible outcomes? The following list displays some of them (from the least devastating to the worst case scenarios):
- getting banned on your favorite services (streaming, shopping...)
- disconnecting from the Internet by your provider
- arrest for sharing highly illegal content
Conclusion
Honeygain services are interesting and smart idea. However, it is mainly attractive only for illegal business partners. In case of problems, most likely you would be the responsible for every illegal activity done via your IP address. Because of that, I would not recommend to use this service at all.