I use Google DNS because it’s fast and reliable, and close to me. I’m not sure what else I’d use that’s more trustworthy. Certainly my ISP isn’t.

Their DNS privacy policy seems acceptable to me, as they’re not using it for ad data: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

Google obviously has many concerns, but they’re trustworthy enough to follow their own privacy policy lest they get smited by governments.

You give data away, true, but I wouldn’t say DNS lookups == browsing data.

Example: They can see that I have visited Wikipedia, but not what articles I’ve read. (Other sites will leak more info due to the nature of their subdomains, but it doesn’t bother me personally.)

you're not wrong about the articles, but at the same time just looking at a domain is enough to allow for decent guesses to be made.

lots of hits on hackernews and jsoneditoronline.org and I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that you're in IT or Dev. gonna start sending you ads that reflect that.

likewise, hits to missile-gayboy.jp -- a site that used to be hosted by my old employers -- also sends some pretty clear messages. I don't need to know what you're looking at specifically there but it's a japanese site that caters to a specific niche; I can sure make some assumptions.

hell, at work we don't even collect a lot of specifics on our endpoints -- domain queries are often enough to catch bad behavior

I trust Google more than I do my ISP or third-party DNS provider (I also use Chrome and Google's VPN). Google may use my activity data for their own purposes (which I'm OK with because I find their products very useful), but they will not sell my data and have demonstrated themselves to be resistant to government requests.