3rd party DNS vs ISP DNS

[Brainbleach]

After testing multiple DNS response times, my ISP DNS is by far the fastest option compared to any 3rd party DNS servers. However, I've been running cloudflare DNS for awhile now for privacy reasons. If you guys were in the same situation, would you choose speed over privacy or vice-versa?

 

[Tech9]

There is no much privacy when you switch to another DNS service. Now Cloudflare has your browsing history as well as your ISP. Even if your ISP doesn't see the actual DNS queries, they know for sure where you connect to. Alternate DNS is good for DNS filtering - phishing, malware, scam sites, etc. Usually your ISP DNS servers are the fastest and they may already have DNS filtering implemented. If you want better privacy, use Unbound in AMTM.

 

[bbunge]

DoT to a trusted filtering upstream resolver. Quad9 or Cloudflare Secure for two.

 

[L&LD]

And consider using Unbound_Manager too, (to be your own DNS resolver).

 

[Tech9]

DoT is what most folks use with Asuswrt-Merlin (now available in Asuswrt as well), but it doesn’t prevent ISP to see what servers are accessed. There are indirect methods to collect browsing history without DNS queries and quite accurate. Even Unbound as resolver won’t prevent this, if someone is really interested on the ISP side. They know the IPs we connect to after all. VPN service may hide the traffic, but public VPN services privacy is also questionable.

 

[Morris]

If you want fast DNS, your router will be the fastest and if you enter the IP's of the secure DNS server of our choice in the WAN configuration, it will cache the requests. Besides, don't you enjoy getting adds for the things you purchased the day before?

Morris

 

[Tech9]

Besides, don't you enjoy getting adds for the things you purchased the day before?

I personally prefer the add vs blank space created by DNS-based add-blockers. Nothing beats uBlock Origin in ad-blocking so far.

 

[dosborne]

Personally, couldn't care less if my ISP or other party tracks my DNS queries, so I use my router, locally which is configured to use my ISP DNS. (I use other mechanisms to block other activity, ads, etc)

 

[Tech9]

The only issue is when the ISP re-directs some of the DNS queries, but I haven't seen this happening with the ones I use.