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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I'm pleased, I really am.

However, my concern with CloudFlare is with analytics. I can defeat the typical analytics server with hosts file entries:

   127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
   127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

... but if CloudFlare is proxying an entire domain, many domains, then it really isn't possible for me to prevent CloudFlare from correllating my visits to multiple websites.

Consider the problem faced by evangelical christian politicians, who are trying to keep a lid on their closet homosexuality.

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Aaaand I think there you've got an excellent product and sales pitch for them to advertisers and agencies!

Yes it's a no-brainer that CloudFlare is in a prime spot to collect a lot of data on the traffic that passes through.

However are they going to turn this into an ad-tracking software, or just sell that data ? That seems quite unlikely. At this point CloudFlare has a proven business model, and becoming sleazy could only hurt them.

They wrote an article a little while ago on the matter : https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-cloudflare-logs/ I doubt that has changed much.

ps. full disclosure, former employee here.

Great - thanks for posting it.

To be clear I make a distinction between "web server log file analysis" and "web analytics". Unfortunately it has become fashionable to call damn near anything "analytics" even if it isn't, say in image processing applications.

I am completely cool with webmasters who analyze their own server logs.

What I'm not cool with, is independent websites that correlate their logs with each other. That is, I visit HN and I visit Soylent News. I don't want HN and Soylent sharing their logs about me in any way.

I know that you're a _former_ employee, but maybe you could pass this on:

It would be helpful if I didn't have to keep solving CloudFlare captchas when I use Tor.

I well understand CloudFlare's need for them, however I like to use Tor even when cryptography would not be used for most others, say when logged in with my real name at HN. This because my use of cryptography provides some cover for those who really do need it, such as those working for legitimate regime change.

The main reason I don't use tor a whole lot anymore, is those CloudFlare captchas.

So you're saying that CloudFlare could sell the Republican Party a list of candidates who've got something to hide?

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