Cloudflare Collaborates with Leading Browsers to Develop Privacy-First Protocol
Cloudflare is collaborating with major browsers to develop a new privacy-first protocol for the internet. The initiative aims to enhance user privacy by rethinking how web infrastructure handles data, shifting toward more secure and less invasive data collection practices across the global web.
Background
Cloudflare is a major US-based internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery, DDoS protection, and security services, routing roughly 20% of all web traffic. Along with browsers Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox, they support a new protocol called OHTTP (Oblivious HTTP) — it encrypts and separates who you are from what you're requesting, so a server sees the data but not who sent it. Traditional HTTPS still leaks metadata (like IP address) to the destination server. OHTTP adds a "decryption relay" that strips the user's identity before forwarding the request. This is part of a broader push for privacy-preserving technologies as third-party cookies are phased out and regulatory pressure (GDPR, state laws) grows. Critics note that relays could become new points of surveillance or single points of failure if compromised.