Who are DNS providers and who of them truly cares about your privacy?
When we type the name of a website in a browser, we are not aware of what is going on under the hood, but we just see the frontend loading. But, before we see the familiar website, the data transforms and travels huge distances in the blink of an eye.
In fact, the names of websites exist for the convenience of users, the servers on the network refer to information using IP addresses. And the DNS (Domain Name System) server is used to find the IP address corresponding to the site we requested.
In fact, the one who provides DNS resolver services (owns DNS servers) receives a large amount of information about users: from which IP the request was made, which website the user visited, the date and time of the visit. It can be compared to the fact that someone can view your browser history!
Many DNS resolvers provide collected user data for sale. Hosting DNS servers in the United States allows them to legally conduct this type of operation. Therefore, it’s surprising that there exist DNS services that respect the privacy of their users and don’t collect data for analysis and sale.
Today we want to apprise you of the Quad9 DNS Resolver hosted in Switzerland. It’s a not-for-profit donation-backed organization dedicated to providing a confidential and secure DNS service and protecting users from malware and phishing. Quad9 service is Swiss Data Protection Act and GDPR compliant.
Here you can find instructions on how to set up secure DNS for personal computers and mobile::
- For Windows 11, the DNS setting will be native, so you can wait until its release.
- For Windows 10, you will need to install additional software, but the process is described on the Quad9 website and will not cause any difficulties.
- For experienced MacOS users, installing and configuring the necessary software will also not seem difficult.
- On mobile Android devices, it is enough to enable the option in the settings. You can also use a secure DNS service on iOS and Android devices using the appropriate applications.
- The site contains settings for various versions of Ubuntu, for Windows Server and even Playstation 4.
DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS settings are provided for each operating system. Both of these settings encrypt DNS requests, but there are differences between them. For the security needs of most users, we recommend configuring DNS over HTTPS - that will be enough.
We hope that our article will help you secure your Internet surfing and protect your personal data from collection and analysis!
Sources used in the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad9
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-a-dns-server/
