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cloudflare explain it like I'm 5
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Cloudflare acts as a CDN (content distribution network) and bandwidth proxy for websites allowing them to scale out to more concurrent users then their internal hosting could handle on its own.
As part of this CDN and bandwidth proxy service cloudflare can make content faster to people globally via content caching at cloudflare data centers. Cloud flare helps websites defend against denial of service attacks by keeping those attacks from reaching the internal hosting.
Cloud flare is very popular because they are very good at what they do, and inexpensive for small sites. Because of their popularity they have unparalleled visibility into all internet traffic. In some respects CloudFlare is the internet! That means cloudflare can track most users across most websites throughout the day, they have perfect visibility into most internet traffic.
Some people are uncomfortable with a single entity having so much concentrated information. It is a concern.
If you use a VPN cloudflare still gets to inspect your cookies, and depending on site configuration, block VPNs entirely. In fact, cloudflare is one of the single biggest blockers/hurdles for using TOR as a web browser.
Alternatives to cloudflare include: