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Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers

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.

89 points by stagas - 11 comments

11 Comments

ValentineC [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
purpleidea [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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>

celsoazevedo [3 hidden]5 mins 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?
BorisMelnik [3 hidden]5 mins ago
yep, last website I did was JS free 100% except that pesky cloudflare script
windexh8er [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Isn't this well known when using CF as a proxy? Not sure how they would provide traffic / DDoS telemetry otherwise.
JoshTriplett [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They're serving the HTML, they have every ability to track individual web requests without modifying the content they're serving.
pudgywalsh [3 hidden]5 mins 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.

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

csomar [3 hidden]5 mins ago
To add to your experience: It was also very hard, for me, to find the setting that disables this JavaScript.
moktonar [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If I wouldn't know it better I'd sometimes think some of the big tech shops are just fronts for centralizing the net.