I hear that both CloudFlare is privacy respectful and that it spies on site visitors (with their CDN). What’s your thoughts on this matter?

  • GadgeteerZA
    6•3 years ago

    Must say I get a few complaints from people about that aspect of Cloudflare when I link to articles on websites using it. I can’t control where others put good content though.

    The issue seems to be with Cloudflare acting as a man-in-the-middle, supposedly breaking the SSL and re-encrypting it with their SSL. For normal sites that may be OK but this is not a good idea at all if that SSL is expected to carry passwords or login info or other private info that should arrive intact at the destination site.

    So I’ll also be interested to hear what others think and what the solutions are.

    • @kevincox
      5•3 years ago

      supposedly breaking the SSL and re-encrypting it with their SSL

      There is no doubt here, this is how basically all CDNs work. You need to see the plaintext request in order to perform caching and most other features that they provide.

      I agree, if the content is very sensitive then you shouldn’t trust a third party. However in practice most companies trust third parties whether that is a hosting provider, analytics or any number of functions that it is easier to outsource.

      I think the concern arises because Cloudflare is big. This has benefits and drawbacks.

      • Generally larger companies have more resources to invest in security.
      • Covering such a large portion of the web gives them a lot of possible tracking data if they want to use it maliciously (for whatever your personal definition of malicious is).
      • GadgeteerZA
        1•3 years ago

        Isn’t Conifer more like The Internet Archive service? I was understanding Cloudflare was really being used to help manage massive volumes of web traffic ie. more the network management side?