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by nimbius 1568 days ago
Google DNS should at this point be considered harmful. Devs love to hardcode it in resolvd because 'user experience' but there's ample evidence its just analytics.

Quad 1 cloudflare is reliable doh but comes from a company with a history of bloviating nonsense about internet freedom only to eagerly capitulate to Twitter lynchmobs and blacklist a customer or ten.

https://dnscrypt.info/public-servers/ will give you a nice list of doh to try out. Ymmv however as many are sporadic.

2 comments

Can you point to the evidence that Google DNS is used for analytics?
Another person responded with info, but at this point, shouldn't we assume every single thing Google does, is for analytics?

At this point, the onus is to prove thing $x is not used for Google analytics.

Came here to say roughly the same thing. That it’s Google and they’re not charging you for it can at this point be considered suspicious, if not conclusive.
I think some of Google's efforts are genuinely for the public good, like Project Zero.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Public_DNS

Google stated that for the purposes of performance and security, the querying IP address will be deleted after 24–48 hours, but Internet service provider (ISP) and location information are stored permanently on their servers.

> Google does not use any personal information collected through the Public DNS service to target ads.

> We do not correlate or associate personal information in Google Public DNS logs with your information from use of any other Google service except for addressing security and abuse.

Yes they claim that they don’t use the personal information they collect to target ads.

It doesn’t mean they don’t use the other data for analytics. They could also anonymise the personal information first before using it to do analytics. Like “users who visit example.com also visit “store.example.net” is good information and they don’t need your personal information for that.

Why do they collect personal information? Why do they collect dns logs ?

I know what you're referring to (systemd-resolved "defaulting" to Google DNS). That "default" is a compile-time value, if you use something like gentoo you get to be in full control of what that default value is.