I have seen this argument on HN before with respect to similar scenarios involving so-called "tech" companies acting as intermediaries
I don't think it's convincing
If this submission and this thread are any indication, it appears the "reputation" that CF customers care about has nothing to do with privacy. It relates to price, ease of use, reliability, etc.
If the design, e.g., TLS termination by a third party such as CF, allows for spying, then waiting for evidence of spying is not a good strategy to avoid spying
For example, if evidence becomes available that someone (besides CF) is spying on CF's customers,^1 then for those customers it's too late. For the network traffic that flowed through CF before the evidence became available, any privacy, secrecy or confidentiality has been lost
The damage of being spied upon, if there is any, is already done
1. It's not clear why commenters are only concerned about intelligence agencies
They don't have Cloudflare Tunnels which is almost too good to pass up.
I don't particularly understand how CF makes money on it, with the many high traffic sites I have used that I know don't pay CF a dime. Tunnels adds so much more overhead in compute on both ends more than their normal CDN/proxy would.
10+ BT trackers using CF likely free tier. Low-end EACH 300-500 MILLION HTTP requests/24hr uncached, some exceed a billion reqs/day (using statistics from other open trackers) 20TB-40TB daily, ~1-3 Gbps sustained.
That's a crap load of transfer and compute to process those tiny network connections. As someone that's run a Tunnel on a normal site in the millions, the daemon uses a sizeable amount of CPU and I can't see any reason why it's not the same on the other end.
Whatever source CF has going on, kudos to them and their engineering team.
Lots of people will run http over the tunnel rather than https, so that actually comes out cheaper for CF overall because they don't have to start new TLS sessions.
"Samba unites TV, digital, and behavioral data through AI to power faster, more accurate media decisions. We help the world’s leading brands and agencies reach the right audiences, measure real outcomes, and access signals no one else has."
Congratulations but I also dislike this type of comment because that is not a solution, a workaround that doesn't happen for 99% of the population.
Soon you won't be able to IoT network or block these devices as they begin to partner with Amazon and the likes that sell Internet for near-by IoT devices. Then your only option then is physically removing / de soldering radios from the board.
For now, setting up an IoT network is pretty much best practice, and I'd wager the average Hacker News reader both has the necessary equipment and skills to do it. That may not always be the case.
Assuming they install some 5G modem in the device, which is pretty much dirt cheap these days (our local water utility uses 5G for meter readings, and the cost per meter is something like $1/year), there's literally nothing short of a faraday cage you can do.
The can report on what you watch freely, and only consumer laws can stop them. However, without a wifi connection they can't snoop on your local network, and they probably can't connect the data to you, assuming you don't register the TV for those 3 months of added warranty or whatever they try to get you to register.
I tend to avoid devices that are built to snoop on you, so no Amazon Alexa, no Google Home, no Apple HomePod. Everything I have utilizes local control via Home Assistant, and most of it is actively blocked in the firewall from accessing the internet. It's not hard to implement, and doesn't require a master of IT, but it does remove a lot of the convenience, which I guess is the reason people don't do it.
I posted two comments on similar threads recently. This is only going to get worse.
> Not long until companies partner with Amazon and others to send traffic automatically through their near-by devices like smart speakers, disconnecting will be impossible.
Not surprised if this is happening already. I don't want to remove radios out my TV..
> Samba, a media intelligence company have several partnerships with manufacturers to take screenshots and collect metadata.
Viewer analytics are valuable to companies like Samba, they aren't the only ones. Laws ASAP, these companies will lobby hard to stop anything of the sort.
Not long until these TVs start partnering with Amazon and other providers to send traffic automatically through near-by devices like smart speakers, disconnecting will be impossible.
Vast majority won't know or care.
The way this gets fixed is laws not workarounds unfortunately.
The discussion around privacy is always framed the wrong way.
The authoritarians use the red herring of "nothing to hide", while the liberals only argue on the most sensational abuse cases or somewhat flimsy high-minded principles.
The correct way to get the layperson to care is with a visceral reaction using the relevant buzzwords: "sabotage", "gangstalk", "bully", "witch hunt", etc.
It makes zero sense that the same people who fight so hard over gun rights can completely ignore all the other much uglier ways the powers-that-be can threaten your livelihood.
Nobody ever spells out what "overpolicing" really looks like. Nobody makes clear enough that "the government" is what we call it when we give your literal neighbor special privileges.
reply