Comment by dublinben
3 years ago
Even without a VPN, the built-in tracking protection in Firefox trips Cloudflare’s bot detection every time. It’s a not-so-subtle FU for taking any steps to protect your privacy online.
3 years ago
Even without a VPN, the built-in tracking protection in Firefox trips Cloudflare’s bot detection every time. It’s a not-so-subtle FU for taking any steps to protect your privacy online.
The goal is privacy, but the side effect is that you appear exactly as any spam/scraping bot out there. So website owners block this scenario and are fine that it'll likely exclude a minority of visitors who try to browse the web with maximum privacy.
True, but it still is a flaw with services like cloudflare and I don't believe their users know how many people actually get blocked. There are quite a few people that are familiar with these issues and it isn't only the technically affine.
Users of cloudflare-ish services (site owners) may see a joyful dashboard counter that expresses "we blocked 9000 nefarious attempts this month" instead.
Of course without the big fat asterisk of "actually, we have no idea what our false positive ratio is. So they could be 9000 prospective customers that we blocked."
And then the customer will think "oh wow good service, all those baddies blocked, better stay in the warm embrace of this service or who knows what will happen to my site".
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