Ask HN: Why are alternete DNS providers like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 a privacy hazard
Hi,<p>the discussion about using or not using alternate DNS services comes up periodically here (again today with the AT&amp;T incident), so I wanted to ask a technical question that may be useful to know.<p>Often, there are warnings against using alternate DNS providers for risk of them being able to collect a history of hostnames you visit.<p>However, how would that actually work? There are no cookies or other unique identifiers in DNS - and IP addresses are famously problematic for identifying users. So yes, a DNS provider might see that <i>someone</i> requests questionabledomain.com, but why would that be a problem? How would e.g. Google be able to map an 8.8.8.8 DNS request to a gmail user profile?<p>(Note that I&#x27;m talking about third-party DNS providers that are <i>not</i> identical with your ISP. Of course it&#x27;s easy for your ISP to correlate users as they are the very entity that manages your IP address. However, they can always do that, no matter which DNS provider you use.)