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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you could buy this data anonymously from ISP or the Cloudflares of the world without infringing on privacy.

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Intel has thousands of employees. They could spy on them and not on external users.

Also not OK!

How is your isp spying on you not infringing on privacy?

They know what servers are accessed from their network by design. They don't need to spy and to give data on an individual level.

Yeah the word "spy" might be debatable but it's certainly something like "snooping".

Just because they process the data doesn't mean they need to record it. I feel like a good analogy here is the ISP is your secretary. Sure they must have access to your documents to do their job, but if they're reading through your stuff for "gossip" or snapping photos of your documents, that'd still be an invasion of privacy.

Yes but ISPs are huge and can limit logging to outbound connections. No individual recording would be done. Privacy is kept -- with a big caveat that deanonymisation of aggregated data is possible in a number of cases, of course, granted.

Because it would be totally anonymous! Trust them!

Sorry, my response was a little short. I should have said that people like your ISP and cloud hosting are/can already spying on us. If Intel wanted this data solely for the purposes of improving drivers, they could buy it from internet connectivity companies. We don't also need them tracking everything we do.

Cloudflare doesn't sell, barter, exchange, etc. data about web browsing. No clue where you get that idea from.

GP says "Cloudflares of the world", i.e. companies providing similar services. We can take your word when it comes to Cloudflare itself, but that doesn't mean your competitors don't sell, barter or exchange data - and frankly, at this point, just possessing this data is grounds for reasonable suspicion. At least it seems to me that whatever value or code of behavior can be broken for profit will get broken by someone eventually.

(And even as we trust Cloudflare of 2019 doesn't do it, who's to say Cloudflare of 2021 will still live by this code? Can you guarantee that? I often find myself wishing for an established way for a company to make legally enforceable vows about its behavior. Maybe there is something like this already?)

Suprisingly recently, I learned that cloudflare does hand over data about browsing and also inspects the data that is being exchanged by the user and the web site - and pro-actively hands the data to various gov agencies.

I do not think most webmasters or web surfers know this.

see "Among other things, that resulted in us cooperating around monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content" - and more, via: https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/

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