Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 66 posts

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#41

Post by eastdakota »

uluyol wrote: post #36
jacobn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the most relevant metric bandwidth, page views, or websites? They may not have the bandwidth as you point out, but they have a pretty big chunk of websites. (Obv not 100%) (That said, AWS has a lot more than “just” the TLS connection on a large fraction of the web, including all of my web properties, so yeah, who are you going to trust and for how long?)

Bandwidth is useful because it most directly corresponds to deployed physical hardware. If other providers have made that capital investment, taking customers away from Cloudflare is a matter of gradually rolling out features to meet their needs. Not trying to trivialize the effort, but it seems doable.

That’s not actually true. Compute cycles would be the best proxy for deployed hardware. Just delivering bits doesn’t actually take much hardware. (And not even sure why the amount of deployed hardware is a great metric.)

We specifically aren’t interested in pure bit delivery. It’s a commodity business that will have its margins squeezed to zero over time. We provide CDN services because caching is a useful tool in computer science when you want to deliver performance for other applications. If you measured our revenue per bit delivered, it would be far more attractive than any of the traditional CDN providers because we aren’t primarily selling bit delivery where they primarily are.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#42

Post by tomschlick »

fefe23 wrote: post #32

I don't understand. How is it better privacy-wise to give your users' data to big tech company B from California (Cloudflare) instead of big tech company A from California (Google)? I as your user did not consent to you giving my data to anybody in the first place. In fact I did not even want YOU to collect data on me. Surely the privacy problem is collecting your users' data and giving it away in the first place, no…

The idea of Cloudflare over Google is in their business model to me.

Google is in the business of giving stuff away for free (mostly) and then harvesting as much data as they can to build ad profiles on you.

Cloudflare is in the business of charging money for their services (other than the free tier which is really just a sales funnel) and nothing I have seen from them is about selling or sharing that data in a non anonymized way.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#43

Post by cmroanirgo »

nateberkopec wrote: post #27
SamWhited wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the good things Cloudflare has done for privacy on the web, and I welcome alternatives to Google Analytics, but Cloudflare's mission is to get the entire web behind them and give them complete control over all their TLS certificates, traffic, and now analytics. They may be okay right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping the next CEO, or some future board or big investor group from ch…

People have said this for years, and yet there still isn't a viable competitor to Cloudflare. They still have the best performing and most feature-ful CDN available. The competition is not even that close. Fastly is the only other CDN I could really consider, but their featureset just doesn't compare.

Browsers that supported srv dns records for http/s traffic would be a good start imo. That way you could 'roll your own' cdn without all this bgp/asn low level network switching. Would it be as good as what CloudFlare provides? Probably not, but for a lot of purists, it would certainly be a welcome compromise.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#44

Post by brightball »

Ayesh wrote: post #33
brightball wrote: post #3

I recently started migrating a chunk of my personal domains to Cloudflare's registrar service, just to ensure that my renewal costs were being minimized and check out some of their other offerings. I always thought of Cloudflare as mostly a WAF/CDN/DNS option but I was really shocked to see all of the available functionality that they provide. They already had some analytics available before this announcement. The op…

I was eager to transfer my domains, but they still require to set nameservers to CloudFlare's, so that's still not a completely free registry-cost registrar in my book. Having ~20 active domains, and a good registrar with reasonable prices is good enough and the potential $20-50 savings per year really isn't that meaningful if I have to move my nameservers to CloudFlare.

Oh definitely. It only makes sense if you’re planning to use their other services anyway.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#45

Post by manigandham »

redm wrote: post #30
nateberkopec wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have said this for years, and yet there still isn't a viable competitor to Cloudflare. They still have the best performing and most feature-ful CDN available. The competition is not even that close. Fastly is the only other CDN I could really consider, but their featureset just doesn't compare.

"They still have the best performing and most feature-ful CDN available." I don't think thats true. Do you have an actual reference for this? I've used CLoudFlare heavily, along with Akamai, Fastly, Verizon, Bunny, etc. I would say CloudFlare is the most approachable CDN with a wide set of easily accessible features. Its free tier is terrific too. I would argue that feature for feature, CDN's like Akamai have a much…

Cloudflare is more than just a CDN unlike Fastly and Bunny. Verizon and Akamai are clearly enterprise focused with long feature lists but they still don't match the same useful and modern features like Workers.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#46

Post by akalsz »

bad_user wrote: post #15

If you don’t want to use Google Analytics, respect your users’s privacy, while still getting feedback on visited articles, you can always self-host a first-party Matomo instance. You can, for example, disable its tracking cookie, anonymize IPs, make it deactivate when seeing DNT requests, and it would still work fine. Session tracking would be much less accurate of course, but you didn't use that anyway, and even if…

> You can block requests to Google Analytics, but blocking requests to Cloudflare essentially means blocking the Internet. Checkmate content blockers ;-)

You can still mostly evade their tracking: they're intentionally letting the Tor Browser through, most of the time[1]. Though it's still a tad annoying how they decided that legitimate Tor traffic may only come from the TBB, so you even have to fake certain headers for them to let plain Firefox over Tor use this feature[2].

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onionflare/

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#47

Post by r1ch »

nahtnam wrote: post #28
RKearney wrote: post #19

Cloudflare is a threat to privacy and security with their "Flexible" SSL/TLS option. With the click of a button, Cloudflare will happily strip the TLS connection off your visitors requests and proxy it over plain-text back across the internet to your origin. When I reached out to Cloudflare on this 3 and a half years ago, asking if they could at least inject a header like X-CF-SSL: Flexible or something to indicate t…

While I agree with you, I'm guessing that the vast majority of the users of this feature wouldn't have SSL without it, so it's better in some sense?

I'd argue it's worse than no SSL, at least then I have a signal from my browser that I shouldn't be submitting sensitive information.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#48

Post by gambler »

nateberkopec wrote: post #27
SamWhited wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the good things Cloudflare has done for privacy on the web, and I welcome alternatives to Google Analytics, but Cloudflare's mission is to get the entire web behind them and give them complete control over all their TLS certificates, traffic, and now analytics. They may be okay right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping the next CEO, or some future board or big investor group from ch…

People have said this for years, and yet there still isn't a viable competitor to Cloudflare. They still have the best performing and most feature-ful CDN available. The competition is not even that close. Fastly is the only other CDN I could really consider, but their featureset just doesn't compare.

Content delivery and DDoS protections should really be solved at the protocol level, not by some company or appliance.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#49

Post by r1ch »

saagarjha wrote: post #31
RKearney wrote: post #19

Cloudflare is a threat to privacy and security with their "Flexible" SSL/TLS option. With the click of a button, Cloudflare will happily strip the TLS connection off your visitors requests and proxy it over plain-text back across the internet to your origin. When I reached out to Cloudflare on this 3 and a half years ago, asking if they could at least inject a header like X-CF-SSL: Flexible or something to indicate t…

Flexible SSL/TLS is useful as it truly does provide some of the benefits of a secure connection–it certainly prevents ISP ad injection and casual coffee shop network sniffing–but its major problem is the one you've identified, which is that it's difficult to distinguish from a "true" SSL connection. I suspect the people who are using this feature are doing so because they won't be using a secure connection at all oth…

I've had Flexible SSL default on several times when setting up domains, it's not always a conscious choice. For small businesses who perhaps don't know any better, they move their site to CF, see the green lock in the browser and think everything is fine. It's an extremely dangerous feature and for a security company CF should really be doing better.

Re: Cloudflare’s privacy crusade continues with a challenge to Google Analytics

#50

Post by SamWhited »

uluyol wrote: post #23
SamWhited wrote: post #20

I don't want to diminish the good things Cloudflare has done for privacy on the web, and I welcome alternatives to Google Analytics, but Cloudflare's mission is to get the entire web behind them and give them complete control over all their TLS certificates, traffic, and now analytics. They may be okay right now, but there is absolutely nothing stopping the next CEO, or some future board or big investor group from ch…

I don't see Cloudflare ever capturing even >50% of the market by bandwidth. Companies who have big enough demands (Netflix, Amazon, YouTube) are simply better off managing their own CDNs and I think that customer needs are varied enough that Cloudflare simply won't be able to satisfy all customers. If you go along with the above premise, I don't see what the problem is. You will always have the option of switching CD…

I don't think they'll actually manage to take 100% of the market, but if they take some big chunk they could still do a lot more damage than Google when they decide to start selling all free tier data or something (or even when they get an order from a future government to start doing something sketchy with traffic on their network, if that's more of a threat you're worried about; remember, they can see inside your TLS).

And you don't really have the option of switching CDNs (at least, not easily) if you've bought into all their proprietary stuff like their workers implementation, various optimization techniques that your site couldn't survive without, etc.

Post reply on HN