Nearly every website today seems to be hosted behind Cloudflare which is really concerning for the future of privacy on the internet.
Cloudflare no doubt logs, stores, and correlates network telemetry that can be used for a wide array of deanonymization attacks. Not only that, but Cloudflare acts as a man-in-the-middle for all encrypted traffic which means that not even TLS will prevent Cloudflare from snooping on you. Their position across the internet also lends them the ability to conduct netflow and traffic correlation attacks.
Even my proposed solution to use archive.org as a proxy is not a valid solution since I found out today that archive.org is also hosted behind Cloudflare…
So what options do we even have? What privacy concerns did I miss, and are there any workaround solutions?
Cloudflare can be avoided so far but this may not hold up for long. There are browser extensions that put a strikethrough on all links to CF sites. There is also a search service (Ombrelo) which tags and down-ranks Cloudflare sites in the results. There is a bot you can follow on Mastodon that will DM you whenever you share a link to a CF website, so you can remove it (documented here).