3 ms·
That's a nice straight forward business model most people can get behind. The problem comes later, as it does when any company gets big enough. Few years down
by RyanZAG 11y ago
That's a nice straight forward business model most people can get behind.
The problem comes later, as it does when any company gets big enough. Few years down the line, the board of directors has a look over the company and see's a big opportunity: all that data you're flowing around can be turned into money with some very clever thinking at 'no real loss to anyone'.
People don't like to leave money on the table if they can just find a clever enough way to put it in their pockets, and more than enough very smart people saying "hey, pay me a little bit and I'll get all that nice money off the table for you - nobody will mind, privacy is dead anyway!"
- jgrahamc 11y agoSure, but you have to remember that CloudFlare's customers are web site owners. When they pay for our service they are trusting us with their DNS and HTTP traffic. If CloudFlare were to start messing with their data it breaks that trust and we lose our customers. We'd end up biting the hand that feeds us. Related: https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/
- mtourne 11y agoThe board of directors that would make this decision would have to be a pretty short-sighted one. Most companies that see a lot of traffic, could decide to engage in shady side activities to monetize every bit of data they see. But no leadership in their right mind would want to take that sort of gamble. It's interesting that the "evil eye of sauron" argument always comes up for discussion involving CloudFlare, but is never even mentioned for companies like Akamai. My guess is because of the freemium approach which "has to have a catch, right?". But CloudFlare is a proven business model with substantial revenues coming from people who like and trust the service. There is no catch. ps. former employee here who joined on the idea, and still firmly believes of offering a quality service for a very affordable cost, without being deceitful.
- camperman 11y agoIf CloudFlare even hinted that it was thinking of playing fast and loose with its customers' data, it would be out of business very quickly.