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There's no reason to believe that Cloudflare, a company whose profits come from selling an _actual service_, would do this. I would strongly suggest that you r

There's no reason to believe that Cloudflare, a company whose profits come from selling an _actual service_, would do this. I would strongly suggest that you reconsider your choice of metallic headgear.

ceejayoz 8y ago
While I do think CloudFlare has earned quite a bit of trust in this regard, this is a bit of a silly argument. Cell carriers have been selling location data, despite making plenty of profit off selling a service. It's quite clear "we could be making more money" is a (potentially) compelling argument for large organizations sitting on lots of consumer data.
- bovermyer 8y ago
  OK, fair point.
- jerf 8y ago
  You want to look at the comparative money made selling the service vs. selling the data or other secondary data streams. Cell phone companies sell the data because they are able to make quantities of money somewhat comparable to their profit from the service. Places like Google sell the data (or advertising-based access to the data, which isn't exactly the same, but from this perspective is close enough) because that's their primary revenue stream. But a place that is making a healthy profit on customers, and have no way to monetize a secondary stream at anywhere near the same amount of profit, have several incentives to not to deal with it. One is something that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around, but as a business grows, it gets to a point where it isn't necessarily worth grabbing every penny, because while the business is exerting the effort to grab that penny it's missing a dollar. (This is one of the reasons why there's no chance that Google will simply one day be the entire software industry, or why Amazon still has parters in AWS providing services that you'd think Amazon could just provide.) Another is the risk of exposure or pissing off your profitable customers when they find out about your secondary monetization; if 98% of your possible profit is the business profit and 2% the secondary monetization, then it doesn't take much perceived risk before that's a bad plan. (One of the reasons not to get too upset when some companies make a decent profit; it helps keep them from scrabbling about for ways to extract every last penny from you, which is when they start getting really destructive. You're often better off when companies are not motivated to do that, rather than trying to starve them too hard. I really wish Google and Facebook had found more productive ways to make a profit; we'd all be better off for it.)

ceejayoz 8y ago

While I do think CloudFlare has earned quite a bit of trust in this regard, this is a bit of a silly argument. Cell carriers have been selling location data, despite making plenty of profit off selling a service. It's quite clear "we could be making more money" is a (potentially) compelling argument for large organizations sitting on lots of consumer data.

bovermyer 8y ago
OK, fair point.
jerf 8y ago
You want to look at the comparative money made selling the service vs. selling the data or other secondary data streams. Cell phone companies sell the data because they are able to make quantities of money somewhat comparable to their profit from the service. Places like Google sell the data (or advertising-based access to the data, which isn't exactly the same, but from this perspective is close enough) because that's their primary revenue stream. But a place that is making a healthy profit on customers, and have no way to monetize a secondary stream at anywhere near the same amount of profit, have several incentives to not to deal with it. One is something that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around, but as a business grows, it gets to a point where it isn't necessarily worth grabbing every penny, because while the business is exerting the effort to grab that penny it's missing a dollar. (This is one of the reasons why there's no chance that Google will simply one day be the entire software industry, or why Amazon still has parters in AWS providing services that you'd think Amazon could just provide.) Another is the risk of exposure or pissing off your profitable customers when they find out about your secondary monetization; if 98% of your possible profit is the business profit and 2% the secondary monetization, then it doesn't take much perceived risk before that's a bad plan. (One of the reasons not to get too upset when some companies make a decent profit; it helps keep them from scrabbling about for ways to extract every last penny from you, which is when they start getting really destructive. You're often better off when companies are not motivated to do that, rather than trying to starve them too hard. I really wish Google and Facebook had found more productive ways to make a profit; we'd all be better off for it.)