Celebrating Australia’s Privacy Awareness Week 2023

When a country throws a privacy party, Cloudflare is there! We are proud to be an official sponsor of the Australian Privacy Awareness Week 2023, and we think this year’s theme of “Privacy 101: Back to Basics” is more important now than ever. In recent months, Australians have been hit with the news of massive personal data privacy breaches where millions of Australian citizens' private and sensitive data was compromised, seemingly easily. Meanwhile, the Australian Attorney General released its Privacy Act Review Report 2022 earlier this year, calling for a number of changes to Australia’s privacy regulations.

You’re probably familiar with the old-school privacy basics of giving users notice and consent. But we think it’s time for some new “privacy basics”. Thanks to rapid developments in new technologies and new security threat vectors, notice and consent can only go so far to protect the privacy of your personal data. New challenges call for new solutions: security solutions and privacy enhancing technologies to keep personal data protected. Cloudflare is excited to play a role in building and using these technologies to help our customers keep their sensitive information private and enable individual consumers to protect themselves. Investing in and offering these Continue reading

Navigating the changing data localization landscape with Cloudflare’s Data Localization Suite

This post is also available in Português.

At Cloudflare, we believe that deploying effective cybersecurity measures is the best way to protect the privacy of personal information and can be more effective than making sure that information stays within a particular jurisdiction. Yet, we hear from customers in Europe, India, Australia, Japan, and many other regions that, as part of their privacy programs, they need solutions to localize data in order to meet their regulatory obligations.

So as we think about Data Privacy Day, which is coming up on January 28, we are in the interesting position of disagreeing with those who believe that data localization is a proxy for better data privacy, but of also wanting to support our customers who have to comply with certain regulations.

For this reason, we introduced our Data Localization Suite (DLS) in 2020 to help customers navigate a data protection landscape that focuses more and more on data localization. With the DLS, customers can use Cloudflare’s powerful global network and security measures to protect their businesses, while keeping the data we process on their behalf local. Since its launch, we’ve had many customers adopt the Data Localization Suite. In this blog post we Continue reading

Investing in security to protect data privacy

If you’ve made it to 2023 without ever receiving a notice that your personal information was compromised in a security breach, consider yourself lucky. In a best case scenario, bad actors only got your email address and name – information that won’t cause you a huge amount of harm. Or in a worst-case scenario, maybe your profile on a dating app was breached and intimate details of your personal life were exposed publicly, with life-changing impacts. But there are also more hidden, insidious ways that your personal data can be exploited. For example, most of us use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to connect to the Internet. Some of those ISPs are collecting information about your Internet viewing habits, your search histories, your location, etc. – all of which can impact the privacy of your personal information as you are targeted with ads based on your online habits.

You also probably haven’t made it to 2023 without hearing at least something about Internet privacy laws around the globe. In some jurisdictions, lawmakers are driven by a recognition that the right to privacy is a fundamental human right. In other locations, lawmakers are passing laws to address the harms their citizens Continue reading

Happy Data Privacy Day!

Happy Data Privacy Day 2022! Of course, every day is privacy day at Cloudflare, but today gives us a great excuse to talk about one of our favorite topics.

In honor of Privacy Day, we’re highlighting some key topics in data privacy and data protection that helped shape the landscape in 2021, as well as the issues we’ll be thinking about in 2022. The first category that gets our attention is the intersection of data security and data privacy. At Cloudflare, we’ve invested in privacy-focused technologies and security measures that enhance data privacy to help build the third phase of the Internet, the Privacy phase, and we expect to double down on these developments in 2022.

The second category is data localization. While we don’t think you need localization to achieve privacy, the two are inextricably linked in the EU regulatory landscape and elsewhere.

Third, recent regulatory enforcement actions in the EU against websites’ use of cookies have us thinking about how we can help websites run third-party tools, such as analytics, in a faster, more secure, and more privacy-protective way.

Lastly, we’ll continue to focus on the introduction of new or updated data protection regulations around the world, Continue reading

Certifying our Commitment to Your Right to Information Privacy

Cloudflare recognizes privacy in personal data as a fundamental human right and has taken a number of steps, including certifying to international standards, to demonstrate our commitment to privacy.

Privacy has long been recognized as a fundamental human right. The United Nations included a right to privacy in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 12) and in the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 17). A number of other jurisdiction-specific laws and treaties also recognize privacy as a fundamental right.

Cloudflare shares the belief that privacy is a fundamental right. We believe that our mission to help build a better Internet means building a privacy-respecting Internet, so people don’t feel they have to sacrifice their personal information — where they live, their ages and interests, their shopping habits, or their religious or political beliefs — in order to navigate the online world.

But talk is cheap. Anyone can say they value privacy. We show it. We demonstrate our commitment to privacy not only in the products and services we build and the way we run our privacy program, but also in the examinations we perform of our processes and products  to ensure they work the Continue reading

Data Privacy Day 2021 – Looking ahead at the always on, always secure, always private Internet

Welcome to Data Privacy Day 2021! Last year at this time, I was writing about how Cloudflare builds privacy into everything we do, with little idea about how dramatically the world was going to change. The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the way we go about our daily lives. Our dependence on the Internet grew exponentially in 2020 as we started working from home, attending school from home, and participating in online weddings, concerts, parties, and more. So as we begin this new year, it’s impossible to think about data privacy in 2021 without thinking about how an always-on, always secure, always private Internet is more important than ever.

The pandemic wasn’t the only thing to dramatically shape data privacy conversations last year. We saw a flurry of new activity on data protection legislation around the globe, and a trend toward data localization in a variety of jurisdictions.

I don’t think I’m taking any risks when I say that 2021 looks to be another busy year in the world of privacy and data protection. Let me tell you a bit about what that looks like for us at Cloudflare. We’ll be spending a lot of time in Continue reading

Empowering Your Privacy

Happy Data Privacy Day! At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet, and we believe data privacy is core to that mission. But we know words are cheap — even data brokers who sell your personal information will tell you that “privacy is important” to them. So we wanted to take the opportunity on this Data Privacy Day to show you how our commitment to privacy crosses all levels of the work we do at Cloudflare to help make the Internet more private and secure — and therefore better — for everyone.

Privacy on the Internet means different things to different people. Maybe privacy means you get to control your personal data — who can collect it and how it can be used. Or that you have the right to access and delete your personal information. Or maybe it means your online life is protected from government surveillance or from ad trackers and targeted advertising. Maybe you think you should be able to be completely anonymous online. At Cloudflare, we think all these flavors of privacy are equally important, and as we describe in more detail below, we’ve taken steps to address each of these privacy priorities.

Continue reading

Sharing more Details, not more Data: Our new Privacy Policy and Data Protection Plans

After an exhilarating first month as Cloudflare’s first Data Protection Officer (DPO), I’m excited to announce that today we are launching a new Privacy Policy. Our new policy explains the kind of information we collect, from whom we collect it, and how we use it in a more transparent way. We also provide clearer instructions for how you, our users, can exercise your data subject rights. Importantly, nothing in our privacy policy changes the level of privacy protection for your information.

Our new policy is a key milestone in our GDPR readiness journey, and it goes into effect on May 25 — the same day as the GDPR. (You can learn more about the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation here.) But our GDPR journey doesn’t end on May 25.

Over the coming months, we’ll be following GDPR-related developments, providing you periodic updates about what we learn, and adapting our approach as needed. And I’ll continue to focus on GDPR compliance efforts, including coordinating our responses to data subject requests for information about how their data is being handled, evaluating the privacy impact of new products and services on our users’ personal data, and working with customers who want Continue reading