Take a moment to think before switching to the Google public DNS
Today Google has announced they’re running a domain name server free and open to the public. The Google blog post talks about how Google feels compelled to improve the speed and quality of domain name servers because it will help make the internet a speedier and happier place for everyone. That very well may be true, but I would assume there’s also another side to this not mentioned in the blog post. While Google may offer a great DNS for you to route your visits ESPN.com, Amazon, or Facebook through, they’ll probably also now have a guaranteed way to know every single site and page you visit. Google probably has lots of good ways to get most of this information from you already (through their existing services you probably use), but as a domain name server maps the name of every URL you type to the actual server hosting that site, this should guarantee they get all the information they want about your browsing habits. I can’t imagine that Google is not using this information to their advantage in some other way as well.
I’m sure there will be plenty of people that will immediately begin using the Google Public DNS immediately thinking it’s the greatest thing since slice bread, just like there is always a group of people that line up to buy the newest Apple gadget. This may be the best domain name server created, but you may want to stop and think about what other benefits Google may be reaping by providing this service.
Privacy is not dead on the internet, it is however very easy to unknowingly sacrifice.
Random thought, would it at some point be good for the Google homepage graphic to be Google with the two Os replaced by binoculars? Maybe that wouldn’t portray the right image 
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exactly…. I was thinking the same thing when I saw that specific post some minutes ago and saw your article… good point!
Good points, Josh.
Privacy (or lack therof) was my first thought when I saw the announcement, too. Looks like Google is, for now, taking the right approach in at least addressing the privacy and logging concerns. They have a page up (http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html) that discusses what info they’re collecting and storing.
“We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.”
Hopefully they’ll stick to this!
andrew
wow, it took me like 10 minutes to find this and read it: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html
Well, through a DNS query they only have the IP address of the host making the request, and it is only done once and then cached by your machine for a period of time, so only the first hit is seen by google. So it can build a picture of sites an IP address may visit over time, but that’s about it.
What I fail to see is why would using googles DNS be any better than using your ISPs caching DNS server? I suppose if your ISP is really bad their DNS servers may be dog slow.
Andrew, Thanks for the link to the privacy policy for the Public DNS. I’ll have to take a read through it later.
My first thoughts from the quote you posted is “does not permanently store” PII:
How long does that mean it’s stored for?
Does it really *need* to be stored?
How can we be sure it is eventually deleted?
Oz, it’s possible they can gain use of out derivative statistics (for example they may be able to estimate time spent on each site based on the time between requests to their DNS from your IP address). That’s the first thing that comes to mind to me and seems like a reasonable possibility. It would also have use in marketing/advertising areas. Google can probably create a very widely used DNS and with a very large population using it they may be able to make fairly accurate estimates into things like the traffic to any given site in the world, etc. Large amounts of basic information could lead to statistical analysis that provides valuable information.
I share the worry that it’s yet another data source for Google to obtain data from, although I don’t think the data will be significantly more useful than other more in-depth user behaviour data they already collect.
I was curious about the speed though, and decided to knock up a quick script to compare Google’s DNS servers to OpenDNS and to my ISP’s resolvers (Virgin Media). OpenDNS was faster than Google in my tests, and my ISP was significantly faster than both – see the results.
I’m not entirely sure that they could derive much of use from that; with various browser addons and AJAXy pages making many automated requests and DNS lookups on behalf of the user, you cannot differentiate between “the user must have finished on the last site they requested, and has moved on to another domain” and “the user is still reading (or doing something else), but their browser/other software is making requests (updating pages, AJAXy updates (Facebook live feed, Twitter, etc), checking for new software versions, etc…).