privacy

Google Public DNS Is Scary

by Andy Brudtkuhl on December 3, 2009

When I read the announcement today my first thought was “cool” – that’s good for everybody.

My next thought was of privacy and the implications of Google knowing absolutely everything I do online  (as if they don’t already).

Here’s how this technology works… So DNS is what translates www.google.com into the IP address 74.125.45.100. It’s one of the underlying protocols that makes the internets work.

Why is that scary? If you bypass your ISP settings and setup Google Public DNS, Google becomes your gateway to the web.

This means every request you make to any website on the internet will pass through Google’s servers.

Are you ready for that? They’ll know when you go to Amazon.com or Facebook or Twitter. And since Google controls a vast market share of online advertising – you will start seeing advertising based on the websites you visit (p.s. you do already).

Here’s what Google says about the privacy of the Google Public DNS project

We built Google Public DNS to make the web faster and to retain as little information about usage as we could, while still being able to detect and fix problems. Google Public DNS does not permanently store personally identifiable information.

What do you think about Google Public DNS? Better for the web as a whole? Or is this scary skynet stuff?

We’ll see….

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Market Research With Web Analytics

by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 30, 2009

Now this is some very interesting stuff but I think leads to questions on data privacy and targeted advertising…

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