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Interesting read about Cloudflare and privacy
Hello,
I came across this article and thought it might be interesting to discuss:
It talks about privacy concerns and the idea of Cloudflare acting as a middleman.
I’m not saying I fully agree with everything written there, but it does raise some points worth thinking about.
What’s your opinion on this? Do you see it as a real concern, or just a misunderstanding of how services like Cloudflare work?


Comments
If you don't know what it does you probably shouldn't use it
Also I hate Medium Member-only story
Is this someone re-discovering that Cloudflare is MITM-as-a-service?
The author produces one article a day, with AI generated photos. A brief skim of the article points it towards being LLM generated slop.
Whats a good alternative to Cloudflare DNS?
Depending on your location, dns.sb is quite good. Like Cloudflare, it supports DoT and DoH.
Or... Just run Unbound as a local recursive DNS resolver.
The thing is...nobody cares about privacy. People use google, microsoft, dropbox and are very happy about it. I had a good example recently where a friend of mine wanted to send me his docs and asked how because he uses gmail, which I do not use. I gave him my nextcloud and guess what? He was not even able to enter the password (20 characters, alpha and number, no specials) and uploaded pretty sensitive docs onto Dropbox. I was surprised he did not upload them on FB....this is a good illustration of how people brain work. Easy decisions, quick, free, forever etc. Everything else - oh, it is difficult, I do not understand, I do not have time, I have nothing to hide etc.
There is a certain irony about having to fork over an e-mail address to read the article about privacy 🤣
Bunny if you're willing to pay
Your own vibe coded dns server.
#MeToo: https://archive.is/hwxkx
My opinion is that Cloudflare is trying to replace the internet with itself.
They play the long game and are looking to become for the internet what youtube became for video. A huge monopolist which can't be replaced and impossible to catch up with.
Otherwise I can't justify their infrastructure spendings.
https://freedium-mirror.cfd/https://medium.com/@PlanB./the-shocking-truth-about-cloudflares-role-in-your-privacy-no-one-s-talking-about-this-5efaca6bace0
When you self host a solution. Everyone says you will fail.
When a company pretends to be an expert because they wrapped the same in their marketing, and the have downtown, it’s a temporary story and the we all forget and pay them like Microsoft.
Your naive mentality gives away data.
I never use CloudFlare for anything sensitive. I recently noticed that their SSL certificates do not appear as "cloudflare" anymore but are issued by Google... Which I guess adds another (untrusted?) middleman in the chain!
A bit off-topic, but Google's ties with the government are getting closer each year:
https://defensescoop.com/2026/03/10/dod-genai-agent-designer-custom-ai-assistants-google-gemini/
CAs cannot automatically perform a MITM. The worst they can do is stop preventing an MITM attack that is already in position. It's CF that's in the position to MITM, and they already do so (by design).
yeah one big collusion with the law enforcement and silicon valleys enshitification venture capitalists
I have freedium extension to fix that with one click.
cf is just bad news. every time they blow up the entire internet hopefully a few more people swear off. the recent ai embarrassments are good publicity too.
i appreciate they're incredibly useful in a lot of circumstances but they are not your friend and we should be wary of allowing that much power to aggregate in yet another set of hands.
Yeah Cloudflare’s one of those too useful to quit, too centralized to trust situations, and every faceplant just reminds people why that’s a problem.
Man-in-the-Middle as a service. Takes a lot of trust to do that. Relatively few sites actually are attacked enough for Cloudflare to even be useful for them.
So just like everything else on Medium then.
Bunny DNS (aff/non-aff), the European alternative.
Arnt we talking on a website that already uses cloudflare to began with?
Time to replace your tinfoil hat.
I like Technitium or PowerDNS on a VPS or 2 but he.net DNS. Technitium has been extremely stable for me.
go wash off your blue hair.
I now route over 70% of my internet traffic through Cloudflare.