Google's DNS service is interesting. I was never really sure what the business case for operating a public DNS resolver is, for any company really, but it was warmly welcomed when it was unveiled, at least for me. At the time, the public DNS resolvers I can recall were mostly oriented around blocking content.<p>A lot of people are worried about the privacy implications of using Google's DNS resolver. Paranoia is good, but it's probably overblown here. As far as I know, the primary objective of the project is to provide a fast, accurate DNS resolver, not to collect data. So much so that when it launched, it was originally called 'Honest DNS', as you can see on this bizarre Twitter account: <a href="https://twitter.com/honestdns" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/honestdns</a><p>edit: Also of interest, Google does disclose exactly what data is logged, for the paranoid and curious: <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy</a><p>(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on this. All of my knowledge of this service comes from being an end user, on the outside. Hopefully I didn't mess up any of the details.)
<p><pre><code> In [1]: (8<<24) | (8<<16) | (8<<8)| 8
Out[1]: 134744072
</code></pre>
Oh how the time just flies past.<p>Incidentally there are 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who try to write too clever headlines.
I find that map breaking down usage by country interesting. It seems almost nobody is using it in India and Australia. Is it performing badly, is it blocked by ISPs, or are those people just overly obsessed with privacy? Even China's usage is higher, surprisingly, even though it wouldn't help at all with bypassing censorship.
Public DNS is just one of the many free services that Google provides in order to slurp up every single possible activity that happens on the internet. Visit this website in your logged-in Google browser tab:<p><a href="https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity" rel="nofollow">https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity</a><p>I don't know what it says for you, but for me it lists everything I do in my life. The restaurants I look at in the Seamless app. The Reddit posts I clicked on in the Reddit app. Every single YouTube video I watch. Everything I search for. All of the places I went yesterday and in the last 6 months.<p>And these are only my "explicit" actions. Now imagine that Google also passively knows every single web address I look up via DNS? We share private browsing sessions to them <i>all the time</i> regardless of in-cognito mode or any other privacy safeguards.
In the very first post Google said they will publish learnings from this experiment. What have they learnt from this experiment that we can benefit from.
For performance and privacy reasons, you should use Cloudflare DNS. Please don't trust blindly Google when they say they don't use your DNS request data. It is their core business model to get their hand on all the data they can.<p><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/</a>