For my self hosted stuff I refuse to use their services. I prefer to invest a little more time securing it from my side instead of giving them more control over internet.

[–] QuietCupcake@hexbear.net 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) "owns" half the internet.

100% this^. Even if they aren't actively doing anything terrible that we know of, it still totally undermines people's privacy, even those of us who try to be careful about that sort of thing. Cloudflare is fingerprinting you when you visit sites that use their services for security, and like google, their sheer ubiquity across the web means they can effectively watch and track you wherever you go.

More and more I've been running into the full-page error "please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed" while just browsing around the web. A site is completely locked to any user who runs into this error; it's not just a popup notification, its a blank page with nothing but the error message and the only way to "fix" it is to whitelist their fingerprinting scripts. I use extensions like uBlock Origin of course, but for more fine-tuned script blocking, also uMatrix, so it's usually because of one of those that I get the cloudflare error. I could of course whitelist it, but I never do, I just decide that page is not worth my time. But it's getting harder to stick with that principle as I run into it more all the time, even for sites that it never used to be an issue. It's also part of why it keeps getting more difficult to browse the web with TOR browser.

Fuck cloudflare. They've wormed their way into most of the web now but they've managed to do it in a quiet way that usually goes unnoticed if you're not a privacy nerd. Everyone knows google and amazon are evil and do all that they can to track anything and everything people do, but cloudflare is becoming just as insidious.