Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on DNS or Gmail.

> Now, Google does claim they don't track DNS requests. But consider why that is? Once upon a time they didn't scan Gmail content either, but that was before GMail dominated the webmail space.

You seem to assume that it's a singular organization with a unified agenda, but this really isn't the case. It's the same thing about when folks assume Google looks at your Drive files to recommend ads to you -- it isn't true, there's different motives there.

Drive: we want to sell you storage, your data isn't scanned (except for viruses). Google DNS: speed up DNS, which improves load times, which improves the overall web experience. Photos: Ditto, we want to sell you storage.

Performance is a feature, and most ISP resolvers are junk. Worse, many of those resolvers like to inject their own NXDOMAIN pages. :\

You could argue that Google DNS does positively impact Ads, but only in the respect that faster DNS resolution helps ads load faster too. Overall, I see it as one of those "long term greedy" (my own words) strategies.

As a privacy-conscious Googler myself, I've taken a look at Google DNS to convince myself that it's what it says on the tin. As far as I can tell it is, but I don't expect you to take my word for it. What logging exists is extremely temporary (short-term debugging.)

Re: Gmail, this isn't true either. Sure, there's still processing of your emails (we receive your email, scan it for spam), but it isn't used for Gmail ads. The public perception of this was so bad and the incremental improvement in ad quality so low, that now ads just use your general ad profile. No email scanning involved.

> Software stacks, configuration policies, etc will have all evolved to disfavor niche use cases and favor Google, Cloudflare, etc.

This is a different matter entirely, but this isn't _always_ a bad thing. I'm thinking of TCP here, which has almost entirely been ossified by middleboxes. Same for TLS -- TLS development has been hamstrung by these same kinds of middleboxes and "protocol accelerators." This kind of incredible technology position has allowed for the acceleration of HTTP/2 and the development of QUIC (and therefore HTTP/3). Overall, Google has been incredibly open with the development of these and worked to include everyone. I'm sure it's not always that way. Can you bring up some examples where "niche use-cases" have been locked out by Google-driven software stacks and configuration policies?

I can't imagine using Google services if one is remotely privacy conscious. Just from your own defense:

Drive: > your data isn't scanned (except for...

Google DNS: > What logging exists is extremely temporary...

Gmail: > we receive your email, scan it for ....

With that logic, how could anyone remotely privacy conscious use any service on the Internet?

There’s a lot to worry about w.r.t. privacy online. Virus scanning, spam filtering, and debug logging aren’t high on my worry-list.

I think the point is not necessarily what they are scanning now, but what they might scanning in the future for other purposes.

I am having a hard time with the do not read email part here. Let me tell you why.

1. I do not use google for DNS 2. I do not use chrome. I use firefox with ad blocking 3. I only browse in private browsing mode 99% of the time. 4. I have a script that updates a block list of 10s of 1000s IPs for ad and tracking blocking, etc into my host file.

So I order a box of cigars. Confirmation is to a gmail account. Next day I get stop smoking ads in YouTube. Never seen them before then.

So...

There’s a difference between saying we don’t scan the emails and saying we don’t track the metadata either. So if you bought from an online tobacconist rather than amazon they wouldn’t need to scan the contents.

What is the metadata you are looking at? The email was from [email protected]? Is the email address and subject metadata? If so you are being disingenuous about not reading emails. The idea of google saying we do not read your emails, will be understood by the masses to mean we do not read you emails, not hey we take careful note of the sender and any marks on the envelope but we do not open it. It is free email, got it, but seems a bit shady in the presentation of your do’s and don’ts.

"Google DNS: speed up DNS, which improves load times, which improves the overall web experience."

Oh, just stop.

It's even more disappointing to consider that you believe this to be true.

As a counter-anecdote to your disbelief, I've enjoyed internet on an ISP whose DNS servers were very slow. Slow enough for me to spend the effort to find out what's the holdup between enter key and first paint. DNS responses were about 350ms, compared to 8.8.8.8 sub-20ms.

Edit: I should add that the slowness wasn't a peak hour thing, it was consistent, all day, for several months.

Switching made my subjective experience better.

What exactly is it that you believe is the truth then?

My ISP is AT&T, so I do indeed trust them less than Google. And no, I don't particularly trust Google either, which is why wrote that I can avoid them both by running a recursive resolver on Digital Ocean (but now I have to trust DO).

I could run a VPN full time, but I'm not willing to accept the added latency and bandwidth cost.

What would you suggest?

Fair enough. I glossed over the Digital Ocean part, or at least failed to appreciate it--you are (or will be) independent and not contributing to centralization of DNS.

Thank you! We need more people to run their own network services in order to preserve our freedom and privacy.

FWIW, the first machine I ever had broken-in to was a personal box I ran outside the firewall of an employer and the vulnerability was in BIND 4. Circa 1996 probably.

I’d still run my own email if it weren’t such a pain in the ass. I’m not new to this stuff[1], but at some point you get tired of doing SA stuff at home when it’s also your day job.

1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=qmail+jay+soffian

Yep. I've been using OpenBSD since circa 2000 and rarely deviate from the stock software and configuration. At least as important as security (and not unrelated), they ship HTTP, SMTP, and DNS services in base; services which the developers use themselves.[1]

Package management is more difficult, but if I have to install something as a package I probably don't want the headache. Upgrades are more manual as compared to Linux distros, but they're simple and consistent and well-documented so require no more than an hour every 6 months. Sysmerge (for upgrading /etc) and now syspatch (for kernel patches) have made it even simpler. The upgrades come precisely every 6 months. The system evolves incrementally so I don't need to invest much effort in keeping pace--just stay on schedule.

I only backup user data and a few key configuration files (e.g. domain specific rules for smtpd.conf and httpd.conf) as I can recreate a setup with minimal effort.

I stopped running POP and IMAP a long time ago. OpenBSD never provided native solutions. (They shipped a POP3 daemon, popa3d, for a few years but few people used it.) I use mutt, some others use alpine, and others just forward their email to somewhere else. I do greylisting with OpenBSD's native spamd and some simple RBL checks that run from the MDA, but that's it. I get more spam than I might otherwise, but it's tolerable, especially considering I don't have to maintain additional software. And most other users don't see the same spam volume--I've used my e-mail address on web pages and in public forums for nearly two decades so it's on pretty much every list traded among spammers and marketers.

[1] People criticize their "secure by default" mantra as disingenuous or misleading, but if you've been running these services for years or decades you know exactly what they mean by it.

> I’m not new to this stuff[1], but at some point you get tired of doing SA stuff at home when it’s also your day job.

Amen! Which is really sad sometimes. I really enjoyed that stuff when I was younger. Sometimes makes me wish I had picked another career so I might still enjoy fiddling with more or less trivial tech as a hobby.

>I don't particularly trust Google either, which is why wrote that I can avoid them both by running a recursive resolver on Digital Ocean (but now I have to trust DO).

Why not run DoH over tor? Much better privacy than a server/ip address only used by you and can be traced back to you.

Um, because at the end of the day I don’t care that much and want to actually be able to watch Netflix and stream iTunes and those things tend not to work unless they can route you to a reasonably close CDN, which means knowing at least your /24 usually.

cloudflare dns [1]

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/

I'm not certain it is relevant anymore but ISPs used to MITM DNS requests and would send you to redirects for search/advertising pages for what should've been NXDOMAIN responses. Google at the moment has a better track record here.

They didn’t MITM the requests ... you had to explicitly be using the ISP’s DNS servers. And yes this is one of the reasons I long ago stopped using my ISPs DNS servers.

So I've encountered ISPs that do MITM the requests regardless of which provider you use.

Maybe you shouldn't talk so confidently, considering you got it all wrong about GMail? It's always scanned your email. How do you think spam filtering works? And it used to scan emails for advertising, but doesn't anymore:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html