Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers
94 points - today at 5:49 PM
A few hours ago I switched my nameservers to Cloudflare in order to enable R2 bucket serving through my own subdomain, and I found out that it silently had injected a JS analytics snippet in my HTML-only JS-free site textlog.cc — I had to go to the Analytics dashboard, Add the site to the analytics and then disable the snippet. I find this approach entirely invasive, you should opt-in to features like that not have to opt-out. Just a warning out there to folks who might not be aware of this.
purpleidea
today at 7:14 PM
Yikes! I see this too:
<script type="module" src="https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v4513226..." integrity="sha512-ZE9pZaUXND66v380QUtch/5sE9tPFh2zg45pR2PB0CVkCtOREv2AJKkSidISWkysEuQ0EH8faUU5du78bx87UQ==" data-cf-beacon='{"version":"2024.11.0","token":"c0859b51a7804ab5a9cc8e9e2b2c4cde","r":1}' crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
celsoazevedo
today at 7:12 PM
Yes, they add the js if "web analytics" is enabled. I believe I had to manually enable it on my old sites though. Maybe it's enabled by default when adding new domains?
ValentineC
today at 7:25 PM
Took me a minute to realise this isn't 1.1.1.1 (which Cloudflare also runs), but their original website DNS hosting service.
Is there an opt-out mechanism at least? CF is burning goodwill in months it built over the last decade.
BorisMelnik
today at 7:34 PM
yep, last website I did was JS free 100% except that pesky cloudflare script
windexh8er
today at 7:06 PM
Isn't this well known when using CF as a proxy? Not sure how they would provide traffic / DDoS telemetry otherwise.
JoshTriplett
today at 7:35 PM
They're serving the HTML, they have every ability to track individual web requests without modifying the content they're serving.
sscaryterry
today at 7:41 PM
100% But this does not give you any useful personal data :)
JoshTriplett
today at 7:43 PM
Or data for the increasingly invasive Cloudflare captcha.
pudgywalsh
today at 7:32 PM
You left out the part about how you use them as a reverse proxy, which is decoupled from DNS. One is coincidental; the other required.
If they can inject script, they can also snoop on all your cleartext traffic without you knowing....
Oh gosh I didn’t enable anything like that also. I just wanted the nameservers in order to serve the bucket under my subdomain. What else is there I wonder?
Indeed. I have several domains using cf for dns only and they don't/can't inject anything into those sites.
To add to your experience: It was also very hard, for me, to find the setting that disables this JavaScript.
Surprise! The man in the middle man-in-the-middles!
This is only the beginning, when you’ll get used to this they’ll do worse and worse, enshittification, remember?
If I wouldn't know it better I'd sometimes think some of the big tech shops are just fronts for centralizing the net.
LoganDark
today at 7:54 PM
Cloudflare is doing this already. Once they had enough monopoly power, they started a program to block all bots that don't undergo invasive KYC procedures. Eventually, they might become a KYC broker for regular browser users too. The free internet is over.