1. Privacy and civil‑liberties concerns
Many commenters argue that services like Cloudflare and surveillance networks such as Flock erode anonymity and enable chilling effects on free speech.
- “Because they slow down and often block access to websites, particularly for people that try to avoid being fingerprinted or otherwise tracked. Pretty evil behavior.” – zbrozek
- “The Flock camera system, and any dragnet surveillance system, is a direct chilling effect to the rights to freedom of speech, freedom from religious persecution and freedom of assembly.” – soulofmischief
2. Security and law‑enforcement justifications
Defenders contend that these tools are essential for fighting fraud, stopping crime, and supporting legitimate police work.
- “My employer is a small business that has an e‑commerce website that is attacked by fraudsters trying to validate stolen credit cards or obtain customer information hundreds of times per day. Operations like CloudFlare are the only way to foil these actors.” – nickff
- “Authorized purposes: locate stolen, wanted … vehicles … apprehend wanted persons … locate victims, witnesses, suspects … assist with criminal investigations … counter‑terrorism …” – yonran (summarizing Flock’s stated policy)
3. Difficulty of separating benign privacy‑seeking traffic from malicious bots
Several participants point out that it is hard to tell a genuine privacy‑conscious user from a bot, which fuels reliance on blunt blocking measures.
- “It is very challenging to distinguish individuals interested in privacy from bots acting maliciously or with reckless indifference. If you devise a way to do this more effectively than Cloudflare, you should start a business to sell this as a service.” – nickff
- “Bots and scrapers and hackers also try and avoid being tracked, which is by far a bigger problem for them and most websites than the 15 of us using tons of antifingerprinting techniques. Evil? No, that’s silly.” – another commenter