Cloudflare Launches a New Privacy-Focused DNS Server, But Should You Use It ?

[steve2470]

https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/cloudflare-launches-a-new-privacy-focused-dns-server-but-should-you-use-it/

It wasn’t too many years ago that geeks would always use a custom DNS server to speed up their web browsing. Now Cloudflare has one too, but should you use it?

Before we continue, for the uninitiated: DNS is like a phone book for your web browser to look up the IP address of websites you try to connect to. Often using a third party DNS server like Google DNS or OpenDNS will speed up your browsing or give you extra featuress like parental controls.

These days most DNS servers are fairly fast so using a third party for speed reasons isn’t quite as important —- but there’s a bigger problem: privacy. Even if you are visiting websites using encrypted HTTPS, the DNS lookup gives away the fact that you are visiting a particular site, as Cloudflare’s announcement post mentions:

What many Internet users don’t realize is that even if you’re visiting a website that is encrypted — has the little green lock in your browser — that doesn’t keep your DNS resolver from knowing the identity of all the sites you visit. That means, by default, your ISP, every wifi network you’ve connected to, and your mobile network provider have a list of every site you’ve visited while using them.

[Susan Calvin]

1. From what I hear, no.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cloudflare+nazi&oq=cloudflare+nazi