Any source for this? Do you work there? I checked their docs and they say they don't "mine user data", so I wouldn't trust anything they say, at least outside legal documents.
> Cloudflare will not sell or share Public Resolver users’ personal data with third parties or use personal data from the Public Resolver to target any user with advertisements.
There's a lot of transparency on that page in particular, down to the lists of the fields in the logs.
Ads are among the most benign things someone could use your private information to do. With your personal information:
* Parties can engage in price discrimination against you. (You don't shop around? you've got some extra spending money? double prices! Looking up risky activities? high insurance rates!)
* Parties can engage in lawfare and blackmail
* Parties can influence elections (without advertising, e.g. by gerrymandering or by targeting your participation in elections just based on knowing how you'll vote)
* Parties can target people of your race or beliefs for genocide (oh, sorry, I meant to say "lawful orders of governments")
Plus the definition of advertising itself is up to interpretation: is sending someone to your door advertising?
> so I wouldn't trust anything they say, at least outside legal documents
I wouldn't trust them even if it were in legal docs. Companies have a long history of being perfectly fine with breaking the law when doing so is profitable, especially when they're likely to get little more than a slap on the wrist when caught, and the odds of being caught in the first place are slim.
> We will never sell your data or use it to target ads.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/privacy/public-dns...
> Cloudflare will not sell or share Public Resolver users’ personal data with third parties or use personal data from the Public Resolver to target any user with advertisements.
There's a lot of transparency on that page in particular, down to the lists of the fields in the logs.