Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers
68 points by stagas 2 hours ago | 12 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.
ValentineC 15 minutes ago
Took me a minute to realise this isn't 1.1.1.1 (which Cloudflare also runs), but their original website DNS hosting service.
replycelsoazevedo 28 minutes ago
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?
replypurpleidea 26 minutes ago
Yikes! I see this too:
reply<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>
BorisMelnik 5 minutes ago
yep, last website I did was JS free 100% except that pesky cloudflare script
replywindexh8er 34 minutes ago
Isn't this well known when using CF as a proxy? Not sure how they would provide traffic / DDoS telemetry otherwise.
replyJoshTriplett 4 minutes ago
They're serving the HTML, they have every ability to track individual web requests without modifying the content they're serving.
replypudgywalsh 8 minutes ago
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.
replyIf they can inject script, they can also snoop on all your cleartext traffic without you knowing....
csomar 37 minutes ago
To add to your experience: It was also very hard, for me, to find the setting that disables this JavaScript.
reply