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Comment by QUFB | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare also has an added appeal to sites such as The Daily Stormer. It turns over to the hate sites the personal information of people who criticize their content. For instance, when a reader figures out that Cloudflare is the internet company serving sites like The Daily Stormer, they sometimes write to the company to protest. Cloudflare, per its policy, then relays the name and email address of the person complaining to the hate site, often to the surprise and regret of those complaining.

This has led to campaigns of harassment against those writing in to protest the offensive material. People have been threatened and harassed.

Really, Cloudflare? It's one thing to provide a CDN service for these these sites; turning over this information is completely different.

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From the article:

Cloudflare does state on the reporting form that they “will notify the site owner.”

That's not surprising (and necessary if complaints should be able to achieve chance in the target).

It doesn't mean including personal details of the reporter.

Ok, so I went to the Cloudfare abuse form [0] to see the specifics.

It asks for a whole lot of information (including full name and email address) and at the bottom states:

"By submitting this report, you consent to the above information potentially being released by CloudFlare to third parties such as the website owner, the responsible hosting provider, law enforcement, and/or entities like Chilling Effects."

It's pretty clear therefore that they mean all of information provided and not just the reason for the complaint.

0: https://www.cloudflare.com/abuse/form

Good point, I only looked at the text in the grey box at the right, not at the bottom, where it is clearer. (Box e.g. for "Violent Threats" or "General" says

CloudFlare will notify the site owner and, where appropriate, the web hosting provider for the site in question.

By submitting a report, you agree to submitted data potentially being released by CloudFlare to third parties, such as Chilling Effects.

>Really, Cloudflare?

To be fair, forwarding abuse reports to the client is standard practice in the hosting industry.

There's been some debate about this in the past (efnet getting upset with Hetzner for example), but I think the general consensus is that it's not really the job of the hosting company to go out of their way to protect abuse reporters.

It's also important to understand that most abuse mail that isn't DMCA spam will be automated mail informing you of compromised machines on your network, it very much makes sense to automatically forward all this mail to the client.

According to GoDaddy, AWS and Rackspace, it is not. Not for non-DMCA complaints, anyway.

Side note: I wrote this.

Why are you cherry-picking the most expensive enterprise hosting companies in the industry? Those are hardly representative of the rest.

What? AWS and GoDaddy are not terribly expensive. GoDaddy is incredibly common. I don't know about Rackspace. Together they make up a large chunk of the Internet as we know it.

AWS and Rackspace are terribly expensive, GoDaddy is huge in the domain space but not particularly big in hosting, besides shared-.

Why not look at the likes of OVH, Hetzner, Voxility, Colocrossing and so on. Or maybe try Level3, their business may be a bit different but they're HUGE and certainly forward abuse reports.

I'm no expert, but a quick Google leads me to http://www.webqom.com/blog/2016_web_hosting_market_share_tre..., which states that GoDaddy is the most popular hosting provider out there.

Yes, Godaddy sells lots of shared hosting at insane margins.

These insane margins help pay for a big abuse department.

Most dedicated hosting providers don't have as big margins because they can't stuff 1000+ customers on one server.

Most dedicated hosting providers don't have very big abuse departments, or any abuse department at all.

What does price have to do with not stripping contact information from a report?

It's got everything to do with having a bunch of humans handling your abuse reports. It's also one of the reasons why IP reputation is so important to these hosts.

cloudflare is legally obligated, like all ISPs, to forward DMCA complaints. do you think copyright claims should be done anonymously?

Complaints about sites people don't like very likely are not DMCA complaints.

Are you mind bendingly high? Where did the DMCA thing come from? The comment is about people sending complaints to cloudflare and cloudflare sending their information to the site being complained about... This has absolutely ZERO to do with copyright.

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