Yeah it's... DEFINITELY a thing you should know, and definitely a thing they don't want you to know, because they want you to not even know they're there!

At least with normal trackers that embed JS on the page, like Google, which can also snoop on basically everything you do by the way, if you block the tracker you're relatively safe (until they change the tracker, until you get an updated filter list... it's a constant back and forth).

You can't block Cloudflare MITMing you. ("man-in-the-middle", they pretend to be the server and pass on everything you say to the server and the server's response to you, while probably writing down everything for their own purposes. this is a large part of what HTTPS was explicitly intended to protect against...)

The thing is, every CDN provider does the exact same thing, and the modern internet wouldn’t work without them. Cloudflare gets a bad rap largely because they offer free and low cost services that are very attractive to individuals, hobbiests, etc.

Companies like Akamai, Fastly, AWS, etc. offer virtually identical services but you may never have heard of them because they mostly only offer services to corporate customers. But their CDNs operate the same way - by decoding the traffic so they can analyze it for purposes of caching it to speed up delivery.

Edit: Love how my comments are being downvoted. What I’ve said here is 100% accurate and true. I used to work at Akamai, and still work with it on a daily basis at my current employer so I have a lot of knowledge of the platform. If you think what I’m saying isn’t accurate then just say so.

Um, no they don't. They typically provide a third party domain the website includes stuff from.

Cloudflare also does that, but it's not the issue here.

-- Frost