this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Privacy

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Has avoiding Cloudflare become Impossible? (links.hackliberty.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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...

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry, I was assuming that people knew what they did or would look it up themselves. The short and non-technical answer is "the cloud" actually means "other people's computers" and these companies are the "other people". The why of it is complicated, there are both technical and economic reasons. I think it probably comes down to efficiency and economies of scale.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Care to elaborate?

So far it seems like it pertains to big sites. So if these cloudfare et al are "impossible to avoid" for any other scanario, I'll be happy to be schooled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A quick web search suggests that AWS (Amazon Web Services, I think) hosts 32% of websites. I don't have more nuance to provide other than to agree that these companies provide architecture to a huge portion of the modern internet. Most of everything is held by a small number of companies, just like wealth is concentrated in a small percentage of the population with huge companies owning most of the market.