Cloudflare offers security and reliability services to millions of websites, helping prevent online abuse and make the Internet more secure. When it comes to reports of abuse on websites that use our services, our ability to respond depends on the type of Cloudflare service at issue. Most abuse reports we receive pertain to websites that use our pass-through security and content delivery network (CDN) services, while far fewer reports relate to websites using our registrar services or our services to host content at the edge. Because Cloudflare offers a variety of Internet infrastructure services to users, our abuse reporting system is designed with those different services in mind.
Service specific
Responses to abuse should reflect the nature of the services at issue and the ability to address the harm, while minimizing the possibility of unintended consequences.
Access to an abuse process
Complainants should have a mechanism to present their grievances to the party best positioned to address them.
Transparency
We believe in being transparent about when and how we take actions to address abuse.
Cloudflare’s approach to abuse reflects the nature of our infrastructure services, which are fundamentally distinct from services like social media platforms and search engines that are designed to interact with and curate content. While content curator services are designed around moderating content, infrastructure services operate without content-based distinction to help make the Internet function more securely, efficiently, and reliably. These differences can be visualized in a stack, where services at the top of the stack are better positioned to address abuse in the first instance.
Everyone benefits from a well-functioning Internet infrastructure, just like other physical infrastructure, and we believe that infrastructure services should generally be made available in a content-neutral way. That is particularly true for services that protect users and customers from cyber attacks.
Cloudflare’s abuse reporting system is designed to ensure that abuse complaints related to content can be addressed by those service providers higher in the stack, and to identify those instances in which action lower down the stack is appropriate.
The vast majority of abuse reports that we receive are about websites using our pass-through security, and content distribution network (CDN) services. Cloudflare does not host content through those services, and we cannot remove content from the Internet that we do not host.
Our abuse reporting system is therefore designed to ensure that your report gets to the parties best positioned to address your complaint: the website operator and the hosting provider for the website on which the content is posted. When you submit a report relating to a website using these services, we will take the following steps:
A small minority of abuse reports we receive relate to content definitively stored through Cloudflare Stream, Cloudflare Pages, Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare Workers KV, or Cloudflare Images such that Cloudflare might qualify as the origin hosting provider. If your abuse report pertains to content that we host and that we believe violates the applicable supplemental terms of service, we will remove or disable access to that content. If we disable access or remove content in response to an abuse report, we generally also notify the website operator of our action and we may make the content available again if appropriate based on the website operator’s response.
We may block or remove any content we determine:
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