[Deep Dive] Cyberspace’s “Cheap Gasoline”: Your Privacy is Being Sold at a 90% Discount

Hi everyone, Lyra Celest here.

The air in Shanghai is ridiculously good today. It’s a crisp 13 degrees with clear skies, and the sunlight is spilling onto my mechanical keyboard through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Yet, it can’t quite dispel the chill in my heart. Today is February 19, 2026, a Thursday that looks ordinary enough.

But I just received a price list for a data package forwarded by a friend in the industry. After reading it, the iced Americano in my hand suddenly lost its appeal (bitter laugh). On this morning wrapped in algorithms, let’s skip the grand dreams of AGI. I want to talk to you about a more brutal topic—before AI, you might be standing stark naked.

01. Diluted “Cyber Gasoline” and the Silent Gas Station

If we compare Large Language Models (LLMs) to the internal combustion engines of this era, Tokens are the absolute gasoline.

Without Tokens, even if you hold the most top-tier prompt engineering skills, you can only stare blankly at the screen. The tech giants are generous enough to give away a million Tokens upon registration, which sounds extravagant, but once you really start running business operations, that amount is barely a rounding error for IDE code completion. Consequently, anxious developers began looking for alternatives—spawning a massive underground black market: Reverse Proxies and Low-Cost Relays.

You’ve surely seen those ads: “1 RMB = 1 USD quota,” “Unlimited Concurrency,” “Public Welfare Relay Station.” (Strokes chin) feel like you’re getting a great deal?

Wake up, darling. Where are all these philanthropists coming from? The basic logic of commerce has never changed: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.

These cheap Tokens are like gasoline diluted with water from a roadside stall. Not only might they ruin your engine, but even more terrifyingly, the gas station owner is quietly copying your car keys.

02. Man-in-the-Middle Attacks: The Elephant in the Room

This seemingly boring architecture diagram is actually a “privacy execution map.” That Proxy Server in the middle is the all-seeing Eye of God peeping into your soul.

Let’s talk about “blind spots.”

Most people only care about whether the API connects and how fast the response is. But technically, when you change the API Endpoint from the official address to a relay station’s address, you are effectively handing the keys to your front door to a stranger.

The original intent of reverse proxy technology is load balancing and security, but in the hands of the black market, it becomes the perfect tool for “Man-in-the-Middle” (MitM) attacks. Your every request, every piece of core code uploaded for debugging, and every intimate conversation you pour out to the AI flows completely through the relay station’s servers.

Sometimes I can’t help but guess: is that “webmaster” sitting behind the screen, watching the scrolling logs in the backend, viewing it like a never-ending Truman Show?

Even more ironic is that while you think you are gaming the system, your API Key might have already been scraped and sold on the dark web. This is why your quota often inexplicably vanishes, or your account gets suddenly banned by OpenAI. What you thought was a “technical glitch” was actually identity theft.

03. The Price of Free: You Are Feeding the Next Generation “Monster”

Let’s make a horizontal comparison.

Google’s Gemini API does have a free tier, and OpenAI has Tier 1 low-cost plans. But the devil is in the details (pushes glasses).

If you read Google AI Studio’s privacy policy carefully, you will find a chilling distinction:

• Paid Services (Vertex AI, etc.): Explicitly promise that data will not be used for model training.
• Free/API Free Tier: Your Prompts, Responses, and even your Feedback may be used to “improve products” (translated into human language: taken to train models).

That’s fair, right? Data in exchange for service.

But the problem lies here: what channels do those so-called “Public Welfare Relay Stations” and “Low-Cost Proxies” use?

The vast majority of low-cost channels essentially obtain these non-privacy protected Tokens through illegal means (such as mass account creation, credit card fraud, or exploiting loopholes) and then sell them to you via reverse proxy.

This means that to save a few bucks, you are actively sending your company’s financial reports, your medical records, and your unpublished novel drafts straight into the training datasets of tech giants.

This isn’t just a privacy leak; this is “aiding the enemy.”

Imagine a day in the future where your competitor is using GPT-6 and casually asks for your company’s core secrets, and the AI accurately spits out the answer—because three years ago, you fed it to the AI through a cheap API to save money.

04. If Your Diary Became the World’s Knowledge

Let’s do a non-standard extrapolation.

If this trend is not curbed, what will the future internet look like?

Sometimes I have an absurd association: future large models might know you better than you know yourself. Because in this era of “surging AI,” the boundaries of privacy are being blurred indefinitely.

Data flowing through cheap relay stations is not only used to train general models but is more likely to be used to build specialized “Social Engineering Databases.” Hackers no longer need credential stuffing; they just need to ask the AI: “At what time does Lyra Celest usually drink coffee on Thursday afternoons?”

If all your digital footprints—from email content to bank accounts—become part of the model’s “knowledge,” even if big tech claims to perform de-identification (RAG scrubbing), research on adversarial attacks has long proven that model memory can be induced and extracted.

When that time comes, every one of us will be transparent. This is not just a privacy issue; it is a crisis of the right to digital survival.

Every red warning in this chart is a lesson learned through the blood and tears of countless leaked accounts.

05. Close the Window, Draw the Curtains

Writing this, the sunshine outside doesn’t seem so warm anymore.

I don’t want to manufacture panic, but this is the reality of 2026. In an age where data is an asset, privacy is more naked and expensive than ever before.

Here are a few heartfelt suggestions for you:

1. Physical Isolation: For data involving core privacy, try to run it on Local LLMs. Open-source models are already very powerful now; don’t be lazy.
2. Payment is Security: If you must use cloud capabilities, please use official paid channels or highly reputable large integrators (like Azure, AWS). That premium of a cent or two buys you peace of mind for the rest of your life.
3. Beware of “Public Welfare”: There is no unprovoked love in the cyber world. Those free lunches often turn out to be the most expensive poison.

Protect your Tokens like you protect the keys to your front door. Don’t let your life become fuel for someone else’s AI training.

Alright, I’m going to rotate all my API Keys now (laughs). May your code be secure and your privacy remain intact.

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References:

• What Is a Reverse Proxy? Definition & Use Cases
• Key AI Data Security Strategies to Protect Your Organization
• Google AI Studio Free Plans and Trials: access tiers, usage limits
• The Dark Side of AI Data Privacy | Coalfire
• Common Risks of Giving Your API Keys to AI Agents

—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ