Best DNS service?

[Seppia]

I have moved and with the moving, my isp sent me a new modem because the apartment I occupy now has 120mb fiber connection (I get it for the same price yay).

Once upon a time I had set my dns to openDNS but I understand they are now owned by Cisco and they collect data in similar fashion to google.

What do the ere tech skilled members recommend as a fast, reliable, possibly not-owned-by-big-brother-himself alternative?

Am I overthinking this and should I just go with openDNS?

Thanks!

[Hobbes]

I personally use cloudflare's https://1.1.1.1/. It's fast, run by a company that isn't in the advertising business, and at least claims to not track your activity (except for certain 'research purposes'). It has also been reliable in my experience, in addition to offering DNSSEC\DNS over HTTPS support.
But I also don't know of other competitors that offer reasonable performance alongside being privacy friendly, so 1.1.1.1 was a compromise in that its' privacy features are at best uncertain as you have to trust the company.

I wouldn't use openDNS. They explicitly aggregate your requests into a profile about you (which literally contains every website you've visited, as that's the nature of DNS) for the purposes of their own advertising efforts\for sale to others.

But then again I'm always on at least one VPN, so in practice I only use cloudflare's DNS to resolve the IP of my VPN provider Otherwise, I'm using the VPN's DNS resolver, which is a very privacy friendly one (although I believe it is internal to the VPN provider; I don't think you can access it without using the VPN).

So: long story short: yes, using a good, privacy friendly DNS can improve your privacy on the interwebs, but at the end of the day the content exchanged between the server and your browser is being sent in the clear, so your ISP could still track all the sites you are going to (and what you're doing there, unless the site is using HTTPS). But having a better DNS server does make it more of a PITA for your ISP to track you. The best solution for privacy protection, though, would be using a pair of VPNs (one on your local machine, and another at your gateway), but that's a different topic entirely

Ever shorter: If you're just looking for a better DNS than openDNS, I'd say go with cloudflare.

[Chris]

You could also use multiple DNS service providers. Ensure your operating system's DNS resolver is doing round robin for lookups, then specify 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9.... whatever. Then at least there is no single place with all of your DNS queries.

Additionally, caching your DNS lookups locally will reduce the number of queries that leave your network. This can be done on your computer, or better yet, at the router.

[Optimal_Solution]

I use OpenDNS because I can configure it to block domains associated with malware (important!), advertising, or various other categories of unsavory websites.

It also let's me view stats on which domains were resolved from my network, which has occasionally come in useful.

[Seppia]

Thanks for the info