Google / Cloudflare's centralized DNS offerings have definite privacy tradeoffs to be considered. And those tradeoffs need to be compared to the alternatives su

Google / Cloudflare's centralized DNS offerings have definite privacy tradeoffs to be considered. And those tradeoffs need to be compared to the alternatives such as ISP hosted DNS or hosting one's own recursive server. This author failed to do any of that. Should be marked 2019 - its not a retrospective of 2019, it was published in 2019. > DNS is one of four ways in which such meta-data gets transmitted in plaintext The author makes the argument that because DoH doesn't plug every metadata leak, we shouldn't plug any of them. This is a ridiculous argument - by this logic, we should never fix any metadata leak because it would still leave 3 unfixed. So, I guess we'll just be stuck at 4 forever. > Using DoH to move DNS to the cloud is a specific way of using DoH that is damaging to privacy in 2019. Why is a Google or Cloudflare server in "the cloud" while some ISP hosted server isn't in "the cloud"? > One significant change with DoH is that the choice what to censor (or block) moves from the network operator to the browser vendor (who picks the DoH provider). If you are a privacy activist this is great, as long as you trust your browser vendor (and its government) more than your own country. If you assume that your browser vendor is out to get you, its not clear to me how any DNS solution is going to protect your privacy. > Crucially, this auto-configuration (be it DHCP or PPP) is not itself super-encrypted I have no idea what "super-encrypted" means. But it sounds nice. > I mention these two stories to show that our assumptions on oppressive regimes may be wildly off, and not represent the reality on the ground in China, Russia, Iran, Indonesia and Turkey. It is a lot of fun being an armchair imaginary political activist, but things are remarkably different if you actually live there. The point that DoH may not solve the privacy problems of political activists in oppressive regimes may very well be true. But, in addition to being presented as just two anecdotes, the argument again boils down to: DoH doesn't solve every imaginable problem, so, we shouldn't use it to solve any problem. > Additionally, that third party then gets a complete log per device of all DNS queries, in a way that can even be tracked across IP addresses What alternative is being proposed here? Using an ISP's server - the ISP is also a 3rd party. Running your own recursive resolver - in that case, you leak all of the plaintext DNS requests. > And for actual privacy on untrusted networks, nothing beats a VPN, except possibly not using hostile networks. Except that a VPN provider is _even better_ positioned to spy on you than Google's or Cloudflare's DNS servers. And while Google and Cloudflare's DNS offerings have significant privacy considerations, a good chunk of VPN providers have unclear ownership structures often times in unclear locations and with unclear profit motivations.