I feel kinda bad about feeding google with data. Is there some name server I can point my servers to that upholds my privacy and does not run analytics on the requests it gets?
This is the correct answer if you trust that your ISP isn’t snooping on your traffic. Your DNS server will send unencrypted queries to the root name servers and the nameservers of the domains you search for. This traffic is easy to detect and parse, so you do need to trust your ISP, or the provider of wherever you host your DNS server.
If you don’t trust your ISP to that level you’ll need to trust whichever server you connect to. It’s a trade off to decide which is best for your use case.
I do the same in opnsense. According to dnsperfbench, running my own resolver benchmarked as slightly faster or at minimum about the same performance as using any of the big public resolvers. I think the only concern is to make sure you’re not using your local resolver if you’re trying to use a VPN.
Thanks for the info, I’ve started using Quad9 ever since I got fiber recently and tried a DNS benchmark tool and saw it’s even faster than Cloudflare at my network
Mullvad’s DNS. It’s available for non-subscribers as well, and their privacy policy explicitly claims they do not log DNS requests in any way. mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/
They support both DoT and DoH, and also have various servers for blocking ads, trackers etc (if you wish to use them): github.com/mullvad/dns-blocklists
I feel dumb for not using this along with my PiHole for my home, I only have 1 PiHole machine and I couldn’t allow myself to set it up as main DNS so I used the default ISP as a second one in case my unit stopped working (because of experience).
Well, if you’re using Mullvad’s malware/ad filters etc there’s really no need for a PiHole in the first place (unless you’re doing some funky custom filtering).