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Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers
69 points by stagas 2 hours ago | 13 comments

A few hours ago I switched my nameservers to Cloudflare in order to enable R2 bucket serving through my own subdomain, and I found out that it silently had injected a JS analytics snippet in my HTML-only JS-free site textlog.cc — I had to go to the Analytics dashboard, Add the site to the analytics and then disable the snippet. I find this approach entirely invasive, you should opt-in to features like that not have to opt-out. Just a warning out there to folks who might not be aware of this.

minraws a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Is there an opt-out mechanism at least? CF is burning goodwill in months it built over the last decade.

purpleidea 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yikes! I see this too:

<script type="module" src="https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js/v4513226..." integrity="sha512-ZE9pZaUXND66v380QUtch/5sE9tPFh2zg45pR2PB0CVkCtOREv2AJKkSidISWkysEuQ0EH8faUU5du78bx87UQ==" data-cf-beacon='{"version":"2024.11.0","token":"c0859b51a7804ab5a9cc8e9e2b2c4cde","r":1}' crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

ValentineC 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Took me a minute to realise this isn't 1.1.1.1 (which Cloudflare also runs), but their original website DNS hosting service.

celsoazevedo 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, they add the js if "web analytics" is enabled. I believe I had to manually enable it on my old sites though. Maybe it's enabled by default when adding new domains?

dchest 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed, https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-rum-diaries-enabling-web-ana...

windexh8er 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't this well known when using CF as a proxy? Not sure how they would provide traffic / DDoS telemetry otherwise.

JoshTriplett 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

They're serving the HTML, they have every ability to track individual web requests without modifying the content they're serving.

BorisMelnik 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yep, last website I did was JS free 100% except that pesky cloudflare script

pudgywalsh 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You left out the part about how you use them as a reverse proxy, which is decoupled from DNS. One is coincidental; the other required.

If they can inject script, they can also snoop on all your cleartext traffic without you knowing....

johntash a minute ago | parent [-]

Indeed. I have several domains using cf for dns only and they don't/can't inject anything into those sites.

csomar 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To add to your experience: It was also very hard, for me, to find the setting that disables this JavaScript.

moktonar 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Surprise! The man in the middle man-in-the-middles! This is only the beginning, when you’ll get used to this they’ll do worse and worse, enshittification, remember?

_def 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

If I wouldn't know it better I'd sometimes think some of the big tech shops are just fronts for centralizing the net.