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title, description, published, date, tags, editor, dateCreated
| title | description | published | date | tags | editor | dateCreated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Nuanced Look at Cloudflare | 1 | 2024-01-12T00:53:27.630Z | markdown | 2023-07-29T11:30:50.873Z |
A Nuanced Look at Cloudflare
Cloudflare operates a global content delivery network that provides performance, security and reliability benefits for millions of websites. However, their position as a centralized intermediary between users and web services also raises a number of concerns around censorship, privacy and transparency that merit consideration.
Special thanks to @cryptomania_skiff of Skiff, an encrypted email service, for providing insightful context from an organization relying on Cloudflare while aiming to uphold strong privacy standards. {.is-success}
By acting as a reverse proxy that sits between visitors and websites, Cloudflare is able to accelerate content delivery and absorb malicious traffic. However this vantage point also enables capabilities for surveillance, filtering and potential service disruption that require thoughtful evaluation.
Censorship Risks
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Cloudflare can block IP addresses, which could enable arbitrary censorship of certain visitors. There are reports of them denying access to political content.
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As a centralized intermediary, they have the technical ability to filter or alter content. However, the extent to which they actually engage in censorship remains debated.
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They target anonymity tools like Tor and VPNs with stringent filters, captchas and even complete blocks. This disproportionately impacts vulnerable communities relying on these tools.
Cloudflare does not proactively censor on their own, but provides tools for site owners to control access. The exceptions are blocking known malicious/abusive traffic (which impacts VPNs and Tor traffic) {.is-warning}
However, Cloudflare has also helped services circumvent censorship by continuing to serve banned content in some regions. Skiff was banned in Russia but Cloudflare still serves Skiff from their Moscow datacenter. Their overall impact on restrictions is nuanced.
Privacy Violations
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Extensive browser fingerprinting and tracking cookies allow Cloudflare to monitor user behavior across sites using their CDN. Users have limited visibility into this data collection.
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Acting as a middleman, Cloudflare can technically survey all traffic between users and websites, including sensitive information.
Cloudflare has been building features such as Privacy Gateway in order to improve this. {.is-success}
- Their expansive presence allows assembling detailed behavioral profiles of users based on their engagement across various sites using Cloudflare. Cloudflare claims to avoid collecting unnecessary personal data, but transparency could be improved.
Centralization Concerns
Smaller CDN vendors would reduce centralized power, but may lack the resources to ensure high uptime and efficient routing compared to a giant like Cloudflare. There are merits to their scale, even if it raises other concerns. {.is-info}
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Even though alternative CDNs exist, Cloudflare handles a large portion of web traffic, effectively centralizing control over internet infrastructure in a single private company. This amplifies all the above concerns.
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Relying on Cloudflare makes much of the web vulnerable to potential service outages at their data centers, as occurred multiple times in the past.
Accessibility Issues
- Sites behind Cloudflare often require enabling JavaScript and cookies to pass through their filtering gates, breaking accessibility for many users.
Required Cookies/JavaScript are not a concern for many modern websites, though it does impact more privacy-focused services and older browsers. {.is-info}
- Cloudflare's dominance and opacity makes it very difficult for users to fully understand when and how their web activity is being surveilled, profiled, and potentially manipulated.
Conclusion
Overall, while Cloudflare provides valuable performance, security and reliability services, their position of significant power merits increased transparency and accountability. There are legitimate concerns around their potential capabilities for surveillance, censorship, and service disruption.
For sites where censorship resistance and privacy protection are critical goals, avoiding Cloudflare or minimizing dependence on their services may be preferable, despite the tradeoffs involved. However, for many websites, the benefits Cloudflare provides in terms of speed, uptime and security coverage outweigh the risks. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
The decision of whether or not to utilize Cloudflare should be made after carefully weighing the pros and cons in the context of each specific use case. But regardless of one's choice, it is important that Cloudflare be held to high standards of transparency and commitment to an open internet by its massive user base.