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Indeed. Imagine an internet user who uses online banking with one of these banks; registered his domains with Namecheap; keeps some bitcoins at Coinbase; pseud
by vader1 12y ago
Indeed.
Imagine an internet user who uses online banking with one of these banks; registered his domains with Namecheap; keeps some bitcoins at Coinbase; pseudonymously frequents Reddit; and posts anonymously at 4chan every now and then.
By merely passively eavesdropping on all traffic from and to your IP address, Cloudflare can build a profile that links your real world identity to all your Reddit posts you thought were anonymous; to the naughty threads you visited on 4chan; to the amount of money in your bank account; and to the domains and bitcoin addresses you own.
This is something that neither your ISP or any of those individual site owners could ever do, and which might even make the NSA a bit jealous. Now consider what Cloudflare could do on your behalf (and make it look like it was you) if, say, a disgruntled employee was actively out to get you.
I'm not at all saying that there is any reason to distrust Cloudflare, but is it not an enormous amount of power to place in the hands of one entity? Even more so than we do with parties like Google or Facebook, which get immensely more scrutinized over it?
- astrange 12y ago4chan's posting API is actually not (as of this very second) behind Cloudflare.