In 2016, CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told the BBC about the beginnings of Cloudflare.

Cloudflare’s roots go back to 2004 when Mr Prince and Cloudflare co-founder Lee Holloway were working on a computer industry project they called Honey Pot.

The idea was that people with websites signed up for free, to install software which then tracked people who sent unsolicited emails.

Five years later Mr Prince was doing a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School, and the project was far from his mind, when he got an unexpected phone call from the US Department of Homeland Security asking him about the information he had gathered on attacks.

Mr Prince recalls: "They said ‘do you have any idea how valuable the data you have is? Is there any way you would sell us that data?’.

"I added up the cost of running it, multiplied it by ten, and said ‘how about $20,000 (£15,000)?’.

“It felt like a lot of money. That cheque showed up so fast.”

Mr Prince, who has a degree in computer science, adds: “I was telling the story to Michelle Zatlyn, one of my classmates, and she said, ‘if they’ll pay for it, other people will pay for it’.”

And so the idea for Cloudflare was born, with Ms Zatlyn as its third co-founder.

You linked their DNS server, which is not their proxy, but yes I use both.

Cloudflare often comes under fire for privacy concerns, but that’s literally true of every public DNS server out there. No one can feasibly run their own DNS server at home. Those requests ultimately have to go somewhere.

I don’t use Google’s DNS server, because their business model relies on their ability to spy on you. Cloudflare’s business model relies on providing reliable network services, and maintaining public trust. In addition, the scale of surveillance they would have to do with the volume of requests they get per second is entirely unfeasible. They simply have too much data flowing through their servers for it to be reasonable.

Could they be spying on me? Yes, but so could anyone, and among the options, they are the least motivated to do so.

You are sending all sites you visit to Cloudflare instead of your ISP. Trust them more?

I’m using https://www.quad9.net which I trust more personally. They explicitly say nothing is logged, and they provide automatic filter of known bad actors on the web.

I’ve used cloudflare and quad9 for years, and there’s even a “private DNS” setting in certain versions of Android to enable encrypted DNS natively, without the need for an app. Even newer versions of Windows supports it, you just have to know where to look.