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 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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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[–] ultranaut@lemmy.world 27 points 2 years ago (30 children)

I don't think it's possible to avoid companies like Cloudflare, AWS, Akamai, etc. Or not without a whole lot of effort that isn't really reasonable and would severely degrade user experience. They provide what's become fundamental infrastructure to the internet, and that doesn't seem likely to change.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (27 children)

What's so fundamental about their services?

[–] ultranaut@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago (24 children)

A significant percentage of the internet relies on them. There's basically no avoiding these companies while using the internet as it now exists.

[–] freedomPusher@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Cloudflare can be avoided so far but this may not hold up for long. There are browser extensions that put a strikethrough on all links to CF sites. There is also a search service (Ombrelo) which tags and down-ranks Cloudflare sites in the results. There is a bot you can follow on Mastodon that will DM you whenever you share a link to a CF website, so you can remove it (documented here).

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