this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Privacy

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Privacy is the ability for an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.

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Has avoiding Cloudflare become Impossible? (links.hackliberty.org)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by c0mmando@links.hackliberty.org to c/privacy@links.hackliberty.org
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Nearly every website today seems to be hosted behind Cloudflare which is really concerning for the future of privacy on the internet.

Cloudflare no doubt logs, stores, and correlates network telemetry that can be used for a wide array of deanonymization attacks. Not only that, but Cloudflare acts as a man-in-the-middle for all encrypted traffic which means that not even TLS will prevent Cloudflare from snooping on you. Their position across the internet also lends them the ability to conduct netflow and traffic correlation attacks.

~~Even my proposed solution to use archive.org as a proxy is not a valid solution since I found out today that archive.org is also hosted behind Cloudflare...~~ edit: i was wrong

So what options do we even have? What privacy concerns did I miss, and are there any workaround solutions?

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[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Sure, so they're fundamental to businesses. Not to the internet.

[–] BluesF@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

User experience isn't just for businesses.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world -3 points 10 months ago

User experience?

Wait, I thought we were talking about more than just user experience.

[–] Strykker@programming.dev 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sure 100% you can build a website without them.

But anyone expecting to serve millions of users is going to use and need them or the user experience will suffer

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's my point. So it's not fundamental. Just fundamental for big sites.

And not anyone. Cloudfare and AWS are not the only cloud/CDN services in the world.

But I understand now.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The pattern is that big businesses can afford their own infosec experts and have no use for CF (who poses a disclosure risk to their business). It’s the small mom & pop shops that cling to CF. They hire someone cheap who doesn’t have a high infosec proficiency, who just takes the cheap lazy path of deploying the site on CF. They usually don’t even bother to tweak CF’s extra privacy-hostile default settings.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Interesting. That makes sense in many reasonable contexts.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You say “fundamental” when I think (from context) you mean to say “essential”. But to be clear, Cloudflare is not essential to business or the internet. Consider banking in the US. Big banks are competent enough to not need CF. But credit unions are small and on shoestring budgets. So CUs are increasingly exposing all their customers to Cloudflare to save money. If you are a client of a CU that starts using Cloudflare, I suggest switching to paper statements and quit using the website. Switch to a CU that does not expose you to Cloudflare. So far that’s not difficult but that could change.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Thanks! Good tip.