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…
So what options do we even have? What privacy concerns did I miss, and are there any workaround solutions?
The service they provide to websites is “better user experience” by acting as a cdn close to the user they get better download speeds and responsiveness. It also is a benefit for the business because they don’t have to worry nearly as much about deploying and maintaining multiple servers around the world.
That is why it’s impossible to avoid these companies, every sane website engineer is going to want the services they offer.
And it’s a service that is easiest to offer when you are an already established large cdn.
Sure, so they’re fundamental to businesses. Not to the internet.
User experience isn’t just for businesses.
User experience?
Wait, I thought we were talking about more than just user experience.
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
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.
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.
Interesting. That makes sense in many reasonable contexts.
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.
Thanks! Good tip.