Just now on CBS This Morning, I learned that Cloudflare, a well-known CDN provider, had launched it’s new 1.1.1.1 DNS network on April 1, 2018. Yeah, I’m a little late to the party, but better late than never. 1.1.1.1 Cloudflare DNS could potentially revolutionize data privacy and DNS lookups on the Internet. In case you’re already lost, the DNS, the domain name system, is the global system by which a domain name is paired up with the server’s IP (internet protocol) address. A domain name system example is google.com pulling up the IP address, 172.217.8.14.
Privacy on the internet is a many layered problem. Anonymous browsing, clearing cache and VPNs are all absolutely good practices. Many DNS resolvers log some level of detail about visitors; to what end varies widely and some are more transparent about the reasons than others. Some DNS resolvers also do things like serve a page with ads if you type in a non-existent domain (which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a privacy issue, but some folks feel is pretty annoying). Using Cloudflare as a DNS provider doesn’t eliminate the need to potentially continue doing the things you are doing today, but the privacy focus and stated data we log, for how long and why, might be something some folks feel is preferable to their current DNS resolver.
So, I’m going to try out this new service and see how well it works. But, I’m also going to keep using a VPN when I’m on public WiFi. If you too give Cloudflare a try, let me know how it goes.