Verisign's newly launched Public DNS service promises to respect user privacy

[jwoegerbauer]

IPv4 addresses
Primary (Preferred): 64.6.64.6
Secondary (Alternate): 64.6.65.6

IPv6 addresses
Primary (Preferred): 2620:74:1b::1:1
Secondary (Alternate): 2620:74:1c::2:2

[SpankedHam]

Yep, a good old boy American company subject to US law will respect your privacy.

[jwoegerbauer]

Yep, a good old boy American company subject to US law will respect your privacy.

That's NOT the point here. The point is: Verisign will not sell your DNS data to third parties.

Most people aren't aware that it's every Domain Name Systems (DNS) which has too much access to personal information that can be used against you. Internet users typically rely on their ISP's DNS servers or a 3rd party DNS, which are often configured to comprehensively log your Internet activity and sometimes even censor websites - even if you use a VPN. Most 3rd Party DNS servers log a tremendous amount of data and can keep a perfect record of when and where you go online. For example, Google DNS logs IP address, websites visited, geolocation data, and much more.

Yes, it's another side to the Internet where the data from our DNS usage is sold to organizations without consent. There's literally nothing you can do on the Internet today that doesn't require a DNS lookup. Make a VoIP call, look up directions, search for products, post something on Facebook, it doesn't matter – when you do something on the Internet, DNS servers record it. DNS is one of the richest data sources available regarding online activities, making it highly sought-after from a data analytics perspective. If you want a sense of how rich this data is, simply look at your browser's history and that will give you an idea of what you did today, and even what you were thinking at certain times of the day. Now, imagine being able to go a level deeper. Imagine that information in the hands of ad resellers or spammers.

What does your DNS provider do with this data? Do they respect your data privacy?

Verisign's Public DNS is a recursive service that's free and respects your privacy, since Verisign will not sell your DNS data to third parties. I trust in this. And if this assurance should be lied, then it's also no deterioration for me.


ADDENDUM:

In the disputation privacy deficiencies of the Domain Name System, inference attacks, behavior-based tracking of users, and lightweight privacy enhancing technologies for DNS (German: ) a heuristical technique was described and implemented that was able to generate user behavior logs based on DNS requests.

By logging one's visited websites and the duration spent on each website, the author was able to pinpoint specific users out of roughly 12,000 people with an accuracy of >70%.

I didn't dig deep into the paper as it's over 400 pages long, but the bottom line was that DNS servers could indeed log users requests for commercial use, at least to some extend.

[jok11n]

if the service is free you're not the customer, you're the product