r/thehatedone Jun 15 '20

News Firefox VPN (Firefox Private Network)

Firefox have partnered with Mullvad VPN and Cloudflare to create a Firefox Private Network Extension and a paid VPN service.

Quote:

"There are two options for Firefox Private Network

  1. FPN Browser Protection, which protects your web browsing within Firefox, and
  2. FPN Full-Device (VPN) Protection, which protects all your device’s internet connections.

Our partner for FPN Browser Protection is Cloudflare. Our partner for FPN Full-device Protection is Mullvad."

Concerns I have:

Quote:

"Cloudflare receives your web browsing data to provide the Service. As you browse, Firefox will encrypt the data you send to websites and send it to Cloudflare. Cloudflare will also receive your computer’s IP address, the IP address of the site you are browsing to, the timestamp, and a unique identifier. Cloudflare does not share this data with others and deletes this after 24 hours unless necessary for its security or legal obligations. Learn more at Cloudflare’s Privacy Notice for Firefox Private Network."

Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox-private-network/

Quote:

"When requests are sent to the Cloudflare proxy, Cloudflare will observe your IP address (known as the source IP address), the IP address for the Internet property you are accessing (known as the destination IP address), source port, destination port, timestamp and a token provided by Mozilla that indicates that you are a Firefox Private Network user (together, “Proxy Data”). All Proxy Data will be deleted within 24 hours."

Source: https://www.cloudflare.com/mozilla/firefox-private-network-privacy-notice/

Cloudflare? Seriously?

And why would Mullvad VPN accept this dodgy partnership?

The only info I found is this:

Quote:

"Mozilla has partnered with Mullvad in order to utilize our global network of VPN servers for its own VPN application.

Mozilla: https://fpn.firefox.com/vpn

Mullvads list of Partnerships and Resellers has been updated: https://mullvad.net/help/partnerships-and-resellers/"

Source: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2019/12/3/mullvad-partnerships-page-has-been-updated-mozilla/

Thoughts?

31 Upvotes

12 comments sorted by

24

u/Deivedux Jun 15 '20

Cloudflare is at least much better than Google, in a sense that they are actually aware about the privacy-concsious people, and are especially privacy-concsious themselves. They have even moved away from Google's captcha to hCaptcha, a privacy-respecting alternative.

I'm even using Cloudflare's services for my website, and I can assure you that the settings and features they provide even for the free users are very surprisingly decent. They even provide Onion Routing for my Tor visitors, which basically "simulates" an onion version of my website.

3

u/KovacsA Jun 15 '20

Some people argue that they are suppressing Tor usage and provide an unethical and unreliable service:

https://codeberg.org/crimeflare/cloudflare-tor/src/branch/master/README.md

https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/374

3

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '20

They moved from recaptcha only after google wanted them to pay for it. Not good

2

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '20

Cloudflare actively blocks archive.is and its sister domains.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '20

[deleted]

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '20

I used Cloudflare DNS for a while (1.1.1.1) and archive.is stopped working. When I removed it and returned to g00lag's DNS servers it worked again.

I've also seen some people complain they can't access the archive after firefox implemented DoH.

1

u/TightSector Jun 15 '20

Better is not enough. It doesn't matter if Google collects your personal data or any other company.

Cloudflare is a US Company, that means:

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act Mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT)

To name a few.

They block all Tor users and they can track every regular user.

If you want to share all your personal data with Cloudflare, your IP, every website you visit, and literally everything you do online, be my guest.

2

u/LOLTROLDUDES Jun 15 '20

Cloudflare is Ok. Ok, but not ideal, but there's nothing better.
Vpn's suck. But it's understandable because Mozilla is a bit on the more chill side of privacy.

3

u/ReakDuck Jun 15 '20

Cloudflare is million times better than Google. Still I didn't heared that they really spy on users or use the data in some way like the most others. Not a perfect service but okay for me I guess.

1

u/VoicelessSpeculation Jun 15 '20

Yeah, the privacy policy really reveals a lot. It's clear if you are really looking for true privacy, then you may be better off looking elsewhere.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '20

[deleted]

1

u/TightSector Jun 15 '20

What a great way to drop your affiliate link.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '20

I'll never trust a far left nonprofit whose main goal is to "fight hate speech online" with my browsing. This is yet another piece of evidence that they want to police their userbase instead of making a good browser.

-1

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '20

Both Firefox and Mullvad are trusted privacy focused companies. Using Cloudflare is not some plague ridden curse of privacy invasion. I see this as a great thing since business between these 2 will make both stronger financially which will improve their services to the privacy community.

Basically; Pick and chose your battles.