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by marginalia_nu 1374 days ago
> Your ISP can collect your traffic history AND trivially connect that history to your identity, and sell/provide data to brokers, TLAs, police etc.

That's exaggerating quite a bit. Maybe in 2005 they had that sort of insight, but with HTTPS everywhere things are different. Your ISP can only see which IPs you're connecting to, possibly which hosts you're looking up depending on your setup but DNS-over-TLS and the like will put a wet blanket on that.

Cloudflare (even without warp) has a much clearer picture of your browsing habits. Not only do they see which webpages you are requesting since they're situated as a MITM between you and a significant chunk of the servers online, they do quite a lot of browser fingerprinting and tracking for bot mitigation that could, theoretically, be used to identify humans as well.

2 comments

SNI is majority clear-text today, so your ISP can collect the sites you are visiting and not just their IPs even with TLS. Hopefully that changes soon.

Your point about cloudflare having even more access to your browsing details than the list of sites you have visited that your ISP can collect is a good point. It is kinda crazy how so many companies are OK with a 3rd party terminating TLS for them. And, back on the first point, most sites that do support ESNI today are behind Cloudflare (makes your point even stronger).

But, still, Cloudflare would have to be snooping on content to correlate identity (at Cloudflare scale, that means they would have to already be targeting you), while your ISP already has it.

For me personally (stuck with Verizon which is known to snoop and sell data), I prefer "trusting" Cloudflare until they are shown to be a bad actor like Verizon too.

Wrong, even with HTTPS & secure DNS, your ISP can see every site you visit in plain text from SNI requests.
ESNI is a thing, which Cloudflare ironically supports.
Which is not supported by 99.99% of the websites.
Far more than 0.01% of websites use cloudflare.
Yes, but it's not implemented yet on any website. And there is no software support except beta versions of Chrome/Edge and you have to manually toggle flags in dev options.