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?
AWS is impossible to avoid because there is an incredible amount of stuff on their services. A large portion of websites are hosted there in full or in part. Their various compute services are used by a lot of companies.
AWS is so incredibly big that they are basically “the cloud”. There are of course other providers (Microsoft Azure being the second biggest one) but the developed world would be in chaos if they shutdown overnight.
I am not a huge fan of how big they are, but they are obviously doing a good job.
I can avoid them if I stick to sites that don’t use them.
That seems very hard and inconvenient and a waste of time with no benefit. But you do you.
Wait. You’re all whining that using cloudflare has serious privacy issues, in a privacy-related community.
…and when I mention that I prefer not to use cloudflare, it has no benefits?
Then why whine at all?
Read again, I was talking about AWS.
And don’t call me “You’re all”.
I have my opinions and others have their opinions. We are not a hive mind.
Personally I don’t care about cloudflare but some do.
But on that note, I will just say good luck avoiding them. Unless you mean avoiding using them on your own website.
Sorry, you’re right, you were talking about AWS indeed, but my point still stands.