Online privacy is more important than ever, and sometimes it’s the little things that can help make a real difference.
More and more people are becoming concerned about the idea that their activities online are being tracked, and that they could be identified and the information used against them.
There is no “one thing” that can keep your activity online perfectly private, except not going online at all. That’s just not practical in today’s world though.
Changing your DNS settings to a DNS server that does not log or track your DNS resolver requests is a way to help keep your activity much more private.
Who would want to look your activity up? Well, depending on your activity, it could be the police, it could be a suspicious spouse, or it could just be your Internet Service Provider (ISP) selling the info to companies like Google. Yes, this happens all the time.
What the heck is DNS anyway? Well, the quick answer is that when you type ”facebook.com” into the address bar of your web browser, your computer sends that to a DNS server to have our language translated into a numerical address that it can understand, which in this case would be “157.240.14.35”. Once it has that address it fetches Facebook’s website back to your web browser for you to use.
At this time the most private DNS servers I can find are at DNS.Watch located in Germany. They claim to not log anything at all so your activity can not be gone through later via this avenue. As well they perform their DNS translations (also called “resolving”) very quickly as I have not noticed any increased lag while surfing the web after adding them to my network configuration.
Changing your preferred DNS servers is not terribly difficult, and in fact DNS.Watch offer How-To’s for Windows, Mac, and Linux which you can work through to make the changes.
As always, if you’re not comfortable doing this yourself you can call me and we can arrange to get this done for you at your convenience.
Surf Safely Folks!
Wayne Goldsmith
GoldTek Computer Services