> If I'm in a city square and I want to tell Bob something, but I refuse to let anybody know that I want to communicate with Bob, it's hard to see what I can do

> If I'm in a city square and I want to tell Bob something, but I refuse to let anybody know that I want to communicate with Bob, it's hard to see what I can do You can tell a few people near you that "someone" wants to tell something to Bob and an answer from Bob. They tell people near them and so on, until it reaches Bob. He then answers and tells people near him, they tell those who told them and so on, until the answer is delivered back to you. And since no one can hear what people tell each other, no one can assume that "someone" is you and not someone else talking to you in secrecy, many connections away from you. Think overlay peer-to-peer networks. But the minimum viable threat model is ISP appliances that do classification and identification of traffic, both passively and actively, like trying to probe for protocols and hostnames. If you are not targeting them, you are effectively doing nothing, but pretend privacy PR. Which is the case with Cloudflare's DNS.