Really? That's the only bar? So you're going to trust any company who isn't in this business without even reading & comparing their privacy policy or looking at their past history?
I also have to say I don't understand what you guys' true fear (read: threat model) is. It seems like for Google your criterion is "if they could potentially keep such data, they're automatically dangerous (doubly so if their name is 'Google')", whereas for anyone else not in the advertising business your standard suddenly changes to "I don't care what data they have, as long as I don't see evidence of active misbehavior". To me this sounds like what you really fear is personalized advertising itself rather than an actual privacy or security breach, which doesn't entirely make logical sense considering what the dangers of each of them are.
That's a difference between Apple and Google - Apple is at least partially in the hardware business. Google is in the ad business - the surveillance business - full stop. And I say this as a fan of Google and someone who still uses their public DNS. But it's not surprising that people wonder how they use data.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/facebook_and_... But for every article about Facebook's creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it's Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit.
Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it "surveillance capitalism."
Now what I'm not seeing is exactly which company's DNS is avoiding what credible harm that people here believe is potentially likely to result from using Google DNS.
As far as Google (or any company, really) internally is concerned, the fact that they are merely "using" the data for themselves (to show you ads, or whatever) is not itself a harm to you. (And maybe worth mentioning, they have used a lot of information to make life a lot better for everyone, like location for traffic data.) The harm would be if they used it to (say) discriminate against you in advertising goods/services, or to harass you, or if they did not secure it properly and your data leaked, etc. None of these are things I'm aware of happening inside Google, but if you know of evidence of this happening, I would love to know.
As far as Google is concerned externally, the only threat you seem to have hinted at here is that you believe they are likely to sell your data to other parties who are then likely to abuse them (such as by harassing you directly, or sharing/exposing your data online to others who might harm you). I have seen no evidence that this has been the case with Google (or Facebook) either -- which should make sense given that you believe user data is their most important asset -- but again, if you have any, by all means do share.
Given the above, combined with the facts that (a) so many people here seem to be disregarding the actual privacy policy, and (b) for most people Google probably already has more information to screw you with than your third-party DNS provider ever will, I'm led to believe there isn't really anything to be gained by avoiding Google DNS. But to each their own...
Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack:
You're right, a threat is potential damage, these things are done damage.
But it does. If you need a product generally you would just go out and buy it. Ads are psychologically manipulating you to buy things you don’t need and spend your limited time on this Earth doing things that aren’t beneficial to you. It wasn’t too bad when it was just billboards and TV slots but now it’s you vs the algorithms on a personal level.
I never said that. I said that I'm not going to trust a company that has this business model. That by no means implies that I'm going to blindly trust a company with another business model, rather that trust in such a company is possible.
Telling me you wouldn't trust someone who meets some disqualifying criterion isn't useful if you have so many disqualifying criteria that you wouldn't trust anybody, which frankly is the impression I get reading people's comments on this issue. If you have an actual company that you would trust, and a clear rationale for doing so, that's where we can have a real discussion.
You presupposing that it is necessary to send all DNS traffic to one entity. I run a local recursive nameserver (unbound) instead of sending all of my queries to a different nameserver.
Combined with aggressive caching, any particular DNS server (from .ROOT-SERVERS.NET down to the specific authoritative nameservers for a specific domain) is only able to view a tiny subset of my browsing behavior. Most of the time the query to the final authoritative nameserver is to be followed quickly by a TCP SYN packet that reveals roughly the same information.
Yes, running the full recursive resolver locally can be
very slightly* slower than asking e.g. the local ISP's server that probably has the query cached. Fortunately, local caching limits this (very minor) problem to only the first request for a domain.Even if they don't use your traffic history to help with personalized advertising, they could conceivably use it for other things (e.g., bot detection, usage stats).
Google discusses what they collect in their privacy policy (https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy), but not how they use it.
