7 ms·

Public DNS is just one of the many free services that Google provides in order to slurp up every single possible activity that happens on the internet. Visit t

Public DNS is just one of the many free services that Google provides in order to slurp up every single possible activity that happens on the internet. Visit this website in your logged-in Google browser tab: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity I don't know what it says for you, but for me it lists everything I do in my life. The restaurants I look at in the Seamless app. The Reddit posts I clicked on in the Reddit app. Every single YouTube video I watch. Everything I search for. All of the places I went yesterday and in the last 6 months. And these are only my "explicit" actions. Now imagine that Google also passively knows every single web address I look up via DNS? We share private browsing sessions to them all the time regardless of in-cognito mode or any other privacy safeguards.

sergiotapia 8y ago
Checked. It knows my political affiliation, movies I like, music I listen to, kind of work I do, my financials, my weaknesses as a programmer, what clothes my kids wear, what books I read, what mobile apps I use and how often, videos I watch and who the fuck knows what else under the covers. Disgusting. How does one run away from this?
- shakna 8y ago
  Click 'activity controls', untick the boxes.
- a_imho 8y ago
  Probably can't. You can try obfuscating your behavior with services like Adnauseam or Noiszy?
shakna 8y ago
What it says for me, is 'No acitivity.' And it's been saying that saying that since I clicked 'Activity controls' on the side there, and unticked every box. I don't for a moment believe it's all Google has on me, but you don't have to live with it.
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  I use Google GSuite for some of my email needs and to sync chrome. I use a different Gmail account for maps. I use DuckDuckGo for search. Instead of Google I use third parties for everything else they do that they listed on here that they track. My history/activity on their servers was limited outside of tracking my location. I would love a decent alternative to Google Maps but nothing I’ve used comes close.
  - shakna 8y ago
    I use Google Maps, but that doesn't require you allow them long-term tracking of your location. It'll continue to work. (Disclaimer, below is about maps, and my personal anecdote. Ignore as necessary.) (Though I must say, I'm in the process of trialing a new mapping app. Because Google have failed me. I live in a suburb that was created 2 years ago. It replaced part of an old suburb, and a new area that hadn't been assigned. They created a new postcode for this new suburb too. Two years on, Google doesn't know it exists, so my address doesn't exist. It has my road, but no name, no numbers. I tried out OSM And+ (via FDroid), and Android mapping program, based mostly on OpenStreetMaps. It has my suburb, and my address. Since about 1 year, 10 months ago. The directions are flawless, and it has a decent GPS voice. However, it doesn't have as decent coverage of the Points-Of-Interest stuff that Google Maps has, but I'm fine with that, never used them anyway, apart from finding the nearest fast food place or gas station on a long trip. And the public transport stuff is hit & miss. But I can't keep up with bus timelines in my area myself, they change about once every 3 months because of strikes.)
Coding_Cat 8y ago
In case anyone wants to disable tracking(?), this is the page you need I believe. https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
ebikelaw 8y ago
Google has a stronger privacy statement than any other public DNS provider and certainly better than your ISP’s. They provide DNS because a faster web is better for you and for Google.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  yes. They are a charity and want to make the world a better place.
pclark 8y ago
Aside from having to use Google Apps for work, I do not use any Google services - that url you posted shows totally blank for me -, but I would be very surprised if Google uses their DNS to reconcile "passive" activity back to an individual user. that really seems quite over the line in terms of intrusiveness - is it confirmed they do do that with their DNS? edit: to answer my own question, it looks like OP is misinformed, here is the (very explicit) privacy policy about their DNS service: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy note that in the (wonderful) GDPR world, its very hard for Google to do a sleight of hand with this stuff and actually be doing anything mischievous.
kyrra 8y ago
Google DNS is not used in any way to associate to your Google account. They say exactly everything they record and how it's stored and used. https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy
- mrmondo 8y ago
  I’m almost certain it is, even in the link you posted they use unversed language to state they DO store not just your information but also your personally identifiable (!) information: > “Google Public DNS does not PERMANENTLY store personally identifiable information.” You have to be very, very careful with services like this especially when it comes to Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and the companies they own), they use weasel wording in documents like this almost all the time and it’s clearly with intent to /seem/ as if they’re good citizens rather than to _prove_ that they are.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Yes, they do not PERMANENTLY store PII, because they are crystal clear about the fact that they store it temporarily, and that by that they explicitly say they mean 24-48 hours: > Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. > The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using. > We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours. > In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. "Permanently" is not weasel-worded here.
    - Symbiote 8y ago
      So they do permanently store some information, perhaps tied to everything that isn't PII: my location, connection speed, time of day, access frequency. That can certainly be used to target adverts. When an easy alternative is a company that doesn't have a reason to store this data, why not choose them?
dfischer 8y ago
Is that mostly due to using their DNS? Anyone know of alternative services to use? Does google section off this data as not for use internally? Crazy, interesting, and a little scary.
- icebraining 8y ago
  It has nothing to do with their DNS.
jdietrich 8y ago
Use 1.1.1.1. Cloudflare have committed to never store identifiable information for more than 24 hours and have committed to independent auditing of their privacy protection. It's three times faster than 8.8.8.8 and it supports DNS over HTTPS. https://1.1.1.1/ https://1.1.1.1/ https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers My Google activity page shows a big fat "No Activity". I have no doubt that they have plenty of my personal data rattling around on various servers, but Google at least pay lip service to offering you control over your data. European data regulators would be extremely displeased if they learned that these controls don't actually do what they purport to do. https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > It's three times faster than 8.8.8.8 You mean 3x faster for you, right? We're talking about a geographically distributed system here... for me it's not too different. Or do you mean their DNS servers are somehow by their nature 3x faster than Google's at responding?
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    No, I mean faster across a broad benchmark suite from 227 globally distributed test locations. 1.1.1.1 is faster in every region - in Africa and Oceania, they're faster by over 100ms on average. It's conceivable that some users could get faster resolution from 8.8.8.8, but highly unlikely. https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers Cloudflare are a CDN company. Running a fast geographically distributed system is their core competence.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- mrmondo 8y ago
  Absolutely agree, ideally we’d all be using DNS-over-TLS, however I think but DoH(S) is a ‘good enough’ alternative /if/ you trust the company running the servers. Google I have essentially no trust in at all anymore (or maybe ever), Cloudflare I trust to a ‘reasonable’ degree; by that I mean I don’t believe they would (at the and leading up to the time of writing this comment) sell identifiable user data from their 1.1.1.1 DNS service and they have a very high technical skill level when it comes to internet security especially with regards to routing and network metadata. However it’s still not ideal or even slightly close to perfect security and while I’d trust Cloudflare over Google in a heartbeat - like anything that could change and better options that are also easy to use may (will likely) pop up.
Kenji 8y ago
This lists nothing for me except a couple of youtube videos I watched in 2014. Look like you made the wrong privacy settings, friend.
manigandham 8y ago
FYI: You can also disable those histories by specific app or delete it in bulk in a few clicks.
- benwilber0 8y ago
  They just stop showing your history to you on the website. Don't think for a second that they don't still have it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Do you have any actual evidence of this? It's a massive company with plenty of regulations and scrutiny, along with a rather outspoken employee base. Data privacy is taken seriously whether you believe it or not, and I'm sure you're not confused by the fact that this is the trade for free services?
  - earenndil 8y ago
    That sounds like tinfoil and fearmongering. Do you really think that if that were the case that no whistle-blowers would have come out?
    - teddyh 8y ago
      There are many cases of conspiracies going for multiple decades before a whistleblower attempts to uncover it. And, of course, if a conspiracy never gets a whistleblower, we never hear of it at all. In short, the observation that “there are no whistleblowers” is not proof of the non-existence of a conspiracy. The only thing you can realistically do is to evaluate the incentives of all the parties involved. And, sure, Google’s public promises of privacy (weasel-words or not), provide some incentive for them. But you also have to look at their actual risk of getting caught. How many people inside Google would they need to siphon off this data, analyze it, and re-inject it into their existing personal models (shadow profiles) of everyone? Call it “additional weight-adjustment from machine learning” or something. No-one outside the small group could then see that the extra data came from data analysis. Would the small risk of one of these few people blowing the whistle be worth it for Google, who absolutely depend on having the best information about everyone?
half-kh-hacker 8y ago
How would a DNS query reveal which Reddit post you clicked on?
- gitgud 8y ago
  I think it's more the chrome browser, which is tracking your actions right?
mda 8y ago
Are you sure you know what dns and google dns is about?
jogjayr 8y ago
> The restaurants I look at in the Seamless app. The Reddit posts I clicked on in the Reddit app. Unless I missed a press release announcing Google's acquisition of Seamless and Reddit, this seems impossible. AFAIK MyActivity doesn't track what you do inside non-Google apps.
- nandhp 8y ago
  Probably those apps open pages in the browser (reddit posts certainly qualify), so this could happen if he uses Chrome (or uses Chrome for custom tabs) and has sync turned on. Chrome's browsing history can show up in Web & App Activity if the option "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services" is turned on: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...
earenndil 8y ago
I use cloudflare dns. I don't think that they're good, necessarily, but they definitely give off a better vibe than google. I don't know what the seamless app is, but I have location and background services turned off on my phone. The only google apps I have on my phone are youtube (which rarely gets used) and gboard, which I also rarely use -- I mostly use wordflow. On desktop, I use startpage[1], which is essentially a proxy for google search, but they can't correlate your searches to form a profile of you, and the more people use it the better it works. There's also duckduckgo[2] which is significantly more popular and has shortcuts for searching on other sites such as google maps or amazon; it proxies its searches through bing. If you truly want to go all out with the privacy, you can use findx[3], which is open-source[4], but in my experience it has significantly worse search results, and last I checked it didn't have a fully-fledged image search yet. There are limits, however, to how private you can get. Most people have email accounts through google, which means if you correspond with someone by email, even if your email isn't gmail, google is still analyzing what you wrote (they claimed to no longer be doing this, but I have no reason to believe them). As such, it is your job (not the parent specifically, but anyone reading this) to fight back against google's monopoly on information! Set up a private mail server for friends and family. Pressure work to use amazon or microsoft (not much better, but better nevertheless) for enterprise services over google. (This one may be easier as there are legitimate horror stories regarding gcp and gsuite that you can point to, such as the recent incident of someone's gcp account getting completely frozen without warning and reason for 3 days.) Above all, however, make sure not to look like you're wearing a tinfoil hat. Sound reasonable and if someone doesn't want to switch, don't push too hard; you lose credibility that way. 1: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ 2: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ 3: https://www.findx.com/ https://www.findx.com/ 4: https://github.com/privacore/open-source-search-engine https://github.com/privacore/open-source-search-engine
gonyea 8y ago
Why the hell would Google offer a free service, and publicly commit to privacy in this way, just so they can lie and put the rest of their revenue at risk when a big law suit hits? That’s bananas.
bromuro 8y ago
Why don’t you disable it? Is because you have an Android phone?

sergiotapia 8y ago

Checked. It knows my political affiliation, movies I like, music I listen to, kind of work I do, my financials, my weaknesses as a programmer, what clothes my kids wear, what books I read, what mobile apps I use and how often, videos I watch and who the fuck knows what else under the covers. Disgusting. How does one run away from this?

shakna 8y ago
Click 'activity controls', untick the boxes.
a_imho 8y ago
Probably can't. You can try obfuscating your behavior with services like Adnauseam or Noiszy?

shakna 8y ago

What it says for me, is 'No acitivity.' And it's been saying that saying that since I clicked 'Activity controls' on the side there, and unticked every box. I don't for a moment believe it's all Google has on me, but you don't have to live with it.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
I use Google GSuite for some of my email needs and to sync chrome. I use a different Gmail account for maps. I use DuckDuckGo for search. Instead of Google I use third parties for everything else they do that they listed on here that they track. My history/activity on their servers was limited outside of tracking my location. I would love a decent alternative to Google Maps but nothing I’ve used comes close.
- shakna 8y ago
  I use Google Maps, but that doesn't require you allow them long-term tracking of your location. It'll continue to work. (Disclaimer, below is about maps, and my personal anecdote. Ignore as necessary.) (Though I must say, I'm in the process of trialing a new mapping app. Because Google have failed me. I live in a suburb that was created 2 years ago. It replaced part of an old suburb, and a new area that hadn't been assigned. They created a new postcode for this new suburb too. Two years on, Google doesn't know it exists, so my address doesn't exist. It has my road, but no name, no numbers. I tried out OSM And+ (via FDroid), and Android mapping program, based mostly on OpenStreetMaps. It has my suburb, and my address. Since about 1 year, 10 months ago. The directions are flawless, and it has a decent GPS voice. However, it doesn't have as decent coverage of the Points-Of-Interest stuff that Google Maps has, but I'm fine with that, never used them anyway, apart from finding the nearest fast food place or gas station on a long trip. And the public transport stuff is hit & miss. But I can't keep up with bus timelines in my area myself, they change about once every 3 months because of strikes.)

Coding_Cat 8y ago

In case anyone wants to disable tracking(?), this is the page you need I believe. https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

ebikelaw 8y ago

Google has a stronger privacy statement than any other public DNS provider and certainly better than your ISP’s. They provide DNS because a faster web is better for you and for Google.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ironjunkie 8y ago
yes. They are a charity and want to make the world a better place.

pclark 8y ago

Aside from having to use Google Apps for work, I do not use any Google services - that url you posted shows totally blank for me -, but I would be very surprised if Google uses their DNS to reconcile "passive" activity back to an individual user. that really seems quite over the line in terms of intrusiveness - is it confirmed they do do that with their DNS? edit: to answer my own question, it looks like OP is misinformed, here is the (very explicit) privacy policy about their DNS service: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy note that in the (wonderful) GDPR world, its very hard for Google to do a sleight of hand with this stuff and actually be doing anything mischievous.

kyrra 8y ago

Google DNS is not used in any way to associate to your Google account. They say exactly everything they record and how it's stored and used. https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

mrmondo 8y ago
I’m almost certain it is, even in the link you posted they use unversed language to state they DO store not just your information but also your personally identifiable (!) information: > “Google Public DNS does not PERMANENTLY store personally identifiable information.” You have to be very, very careful with services like this especially when it comes to Google, Facebook and Microsoft (and the companies they own), they use weasel wording in documents like this almost all the time and it’s clearly with intent to /seem/ as if they’re good citizens rather than to _prove_ that they are.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Yes, they do not PERMANENTLY store PII, because they are crystal clear about the fact that they store it temporarily, and that by that they explicitly say they mean 24-48 hours: > Google Public DNS stores two sets of logs: temporary and permanent. > The temporary logs store the full IP address of the machine you're using. > We delete these temporary logs within 24 to 48 hours. > In the permanent logs, we don't keep personally identifiable information or IP information. "Permanently" is not weasel-worded here.
  - Symbiote 8y ago
    So they do permanently store some information, perhaps tied to everything that isn't PII: my location, connection speed, time of day, access frequency. That can certainly be used to target adverts. When an easy alternative is a company that doesn't have a reason to store this data, why not choose them?

dfischer 8y ago

Is that mostly due to using their DNS? Anyone know of alternative services to use? Does google section off this data as not for use internally? Crazy, interesting, and a little scary.

icebraining 8y ago
It has nothing to do with their DNS.

jdietrich 8y ago

Use 1.1.1.1. Cloudflare have committed to never store identifiable information for more than 24 hours and have committed to independent auditing of their privacy protection. It's three times faster than 8.8.8.8 and it supports DNS over HTTPS. https://1.1.1.1/ https://1.1.1.1/ https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers My Google activity page shows a big fat "No Activity". I have no doubt that they have plenty of my personal data rattling around on various servers, but Google at least pay lip service to offering you control over your data. European data regulators would be extremely displeased if they learned that these controls don't actually do what they purport to do. https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

mehrdadn 8y ago
> It's three times faster than 8.8.8.8 You mean 3x faster for you, right? We're talking about a geographically distributed system here... for me it's not too different. Or do you mean their DNS servers are somehow by their nature 3x faster than Google's at responding?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  No, I mean faster across a broad benchmark suite from 227 globally distributed test locations. 1.1.1.1 is faster in every region - in Africa and Oceania, they're faster by over 100ms on average. It's conceivable that some users could get faster resolution from 8.8.8.8, but highly unlikely. https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers https://www.dnsperf.com/#!dns-resolvers Cloudflare are a CDN company. Running a fast geographically distributed system is their core competence.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mrmondo 8y ago
Absolutely agree, ideally we’d all be using DNS-over-TLS, however I think but DoH(S) is a ‘good enough’ alternative /if/ you trust the company running the servers. Google I have essentially no trust in at all anymore (or maybe ever), Cloudflare I trust to a ‘reasonable’ degree; by that I mean I don’t believe they would (at the and leading up to the time of writing this comment) sell identifiable user data from their 1.1.1.1 DNS service and they have a very high technical skill level when it comes to internet security especially with regards to routing and network metadata. However it’s still not ideal or even slightly close to perfect security and while I’d trust Cloudflare over Google in a heartbeat - like anything that could change and better options that are also easy to use may (will likely) pop up.

Kenji 8y ago

This lists nothing for me except a couple of youtube videos I watched in 2014. Look like you made the wrong privacy settings, friend.

manigandham 8y ago

FYI: You can also disable those histories by specific app or delete it in bulk in a few clicks.

benwilber0 8y ago
They just stop showing your history to you on the website. Don't think for a second that they don't still have it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- manigandham 8y ago
  Do you have any actual evidence of this? It's a massive company with plenty of regulations and scrutiny, along with a rather outspoken employee base. Data privacy is taken seriously whether you believe it or not, and I'm sure you're not confused by the fact that this is the trade for free services?
- earenndil 8y ago
  That sounds like tinfoil and fearmongering. Do you really think that if that were the case that no whistle-blowers would have come out?
  - teddyh 8y ago
    There are many cases of conspiracies going for multiple decades before a whistleblower attempts to uncover it. And, of course, if a conspiracy never gets a whistleblower, we never hear of it at all. In short, the observation that “there are no whistleblowers” is not proof of the non-existence of a conspiracy. The only thing you can realistically do is to evaluate the incentives of all the parties involved. And, sure, Google’s public promises of privacy (weasel-words or not), provide some incentive for them. But you also have to look at their actual risk of getting caught. How many people inside Google would they need to siphon off this data, analyze it, and re-inject it into their existing personal models (shadow profiles) of everyone? Call it “additional weight-adjustment from machine learning” or something. No-one outside the small group could then see that the extra data came from data analysis. Would the small risk of one of these few people blowing the whistle be worth it for Google, who absolutely depend on having the best information about everyone?

half-kh-hacker 8y ago

How would a DNS query reveal which Reddit post you clicked on?

gitgud 8y ago
I think it's more the chrome browser, which is tracking your actions right?

mda 8y ago

Are you sure you know what dns and google dns is about?

jogjayr 8y ago

> The restaurants I look at in the Seamless app. The Reddit posts I clicked on in the Reddit app. Unless I missed a press release announcing Google's acquisition of Seamless and Reddit, this seems impossible. AFAIK MyActivity doesn't track what you do inside non-Google apps.

nandhp 8y ago
Probably those apps open pages in the browser (reddit posts certainly qualify), so this could happen if he uses Chrome (or uses Chrome for custom tabs) and has sync turned on. Chrome's browsing history can show up in Web & App Activity if the option "Include Chrome browsing history and activity from websites and apps that use Google services" is turned on: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...

earenndil 8y ago

I use cloudflare dns. I don't think that they're good, necessarily, but they definitely give off a better vibe than google. I don't know what the seamless app is, but I have location and background services turned off on my phone. The only google apps I have on my phone are youtube (which rarely gets used) and gboard, which I also rarely use -- I mostly use wordflow. On desktop, I use startpage[1], which is essentially a proxy for google search, but they can't correlate your searches to form a profile of you, and the more people use it the better it works. There's also duckduckgo[2] which is significantly more popular and has shortcuts for searching on other sites such as google maps or amazon; it proxies its searches through bing. If you truly want to go all out with the privacy, you can use findx[3], which is open-source[4], but in my experience it has significantly worse search results, and last I checked it didn't have a fully-fledged image search yet. There are limits, however, to how private you can get. Most people have email accounts through google, which means if you correspond with someone by email, even if your email isn't gmail, google is still analyzing what you wrote (they claimed to no longer be doing this, but I have no reason to believe them). As such, it is your job (not the parent specifically, but anyone reading this) to fight back against google's monopoly on information! Set up a private mail server for friends and family. Pressure work to use amazon or microsoft (not much better, but better nevertheless) for enterprise services over google. (This one may be easier as there are legitimate horror stories regarding gcp and gsuite that you can point to, such as the recent incident of someone's gcp account getting completely frozen without warning and reason for 3 days.) Above all, however, make sure not to look like you're wearing a tinfoil hat. Sound reasonable and if someone doesn't want to switch, don't push too hard; you lose credibility that way. 1: https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/ 2: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/ 3: https://www.findx.com/ https://www.findx.com/ 4: https://github.com/privacore/open-source-search-engine https://github.com/privacore/open-source-search-engine

gonyea 8y ago

Why the hell would Google offer a free service, and publicly commit to privacy in this way, just so they can lie and put the rest of their revenue at risk when a big law suit hits? That’s bananas.

bromuro 8y ago

Why don’t you disable it? Is because you have an Android phone?