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I'm just curious, given all the other options that respect your privacy and don't put data collection at the center of their business model, why do you use Cloudflare on your pi-hole?
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> why do you use Cloudflare on your pi-hole?

Because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." i'm not one of those users who want to endlessly tweak their ad blocker. i want to set it up, clicking as few checkboxes as necessary to get it going, and then leave it. However, (now) knowing that Cloudflare filters different only each of their servers, i'm incentivized to go tweak a number in the config (as opposed to researching the pros and cons of every possible provider, a detail i truly have no interest in pursuing).

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If you mean you had 1.1.1.2 as a secondary, and don't want it to have a different configuration, you can use 1.0.0.1 along with 1.1.1.1 instead.
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> If you mean you had 1.1.1.2 as a secondary, and don't want it to have a different configuration, you can use 1.0.0.1 along with 1.1.1.1 instead.

i had no clue which one was active. It was, for me, just a checkbox at the time. This thread prompted me to go check and tweak appropriately.

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Which options respect your privacy?
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I use unbound (recursive resolver), and AdGuard Home as well (just forwards to unbound). Unbound could do ad-blocking itself as well, but it's more cumbersome than in AGH. So I use two tools for the time being.

The upside is there's no single entity receiving all your queries. The downside is there's no encryption (IIRC root servers do not support it), so your ISP sees your queries (but they don't receive them).

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I'll throw https://nextdns.io into the mix. Been very happy with it. Supports DOH, block lists, among a plethora of other features.
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AdGuard DNS servers are excellent.
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The ones where you don't send a single company all of your queries
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quad9
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what is the vector here? dns traffic is practically anonymous, there would have to be some very specific and purposeful trickery going on to link dns traffic to an identity. It sounds like something more hypothetical than a tangible threat model
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It isn't anonymous. DNS server resolve, IP addresses by hostnames. It cannot then inspect further traffic but it certainly can log your IP address and all URL's a given IP ever hit.

Since ISP know your identity, and all it takes is to (request and get) the DNS logs and ISP servitude for all sort of questionable information, you as an identity are giving away all sites domains you visit.

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> It cannot then inspect further traffic but it certainly can log your IP address and all URL's a given IP ever hit.

Correction: they can log host names/IPs, not URLs. The path of any given URL is part of the HTTP header, invisible to onlookers (assuming HTTP and assuming HTTPS is uncracked).

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I can't edit. That is correct. URLs can't be known to a DNS server. Just the hostname and IP.
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Considering that the DNS in question is third-party, that is, it's independent from the ISP. Then the DNS and the ISP will not share data with each other on a routine basis, which would make this concern negligible for every day traffic.

So to simplify, the DNS provider has a map of IPs to Domains visited, while the other hand an ISP has a map of IP addresses to identities.

To even cross-reference the data, the ISP and the DNS provider would need to partner, and violate their privacy guarantees.

At the very least it's obvious that using a separate DNS provider than your ISP's provides additional anonimity by decentralizing your traffic. Although this comes with a tradeoff, having 2 providers increases the odds of partial leaks.

This analysis is so overkill for your personal traffic that it borders tinfoil territory, if we are in a professional setting and are discussing the competitive data of a company or that of thousands of users, then this level of scrutiny is merited, but as-is, separating your DNS provider from your ISP is already very marginal and a bit paranoid. Evaluating the DNS providers to such an extent that a huge security company with good legal standing would somehow qualify as unsafe, for the traffic of one user, I stress, is paralyzingly over-engineering the security of an infrastructure that has already been secured such that users don't need to know what a DNS and how to configure it in order to have safe and private internet.

Imagine going to the bank and asking the teller for a withdrawal but not disclosing the amount and coming up with a mechanism to withdraw without anyone from the bank knowing what you withdrew. Sure, it increases your security, but also come on, what are we doing here?

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Hi. If your response involves explaining the very very basics of DNS to someone that clearly knows what DNS is, please consider the possibility that you may have misunderstood them instead of lecturing them on the basics of ubiquitous internet technologies.
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I didn't mean to offense. It did seem OP didn't get the IP can be logged, either that or how an IP can reveal identity.
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I did some experimenting recently and I'm quite convinced that when I use Comcasts DNS they are selling it to advertisers. I've switched to 1.1.1.1 simply because it annoys me that Comcast is doing this.
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How could that experiment work?
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> A Cloudflare Ray ID is an identifier given to every request that goes through Cloudflare.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/clo...

if you think a little creatively about how this information could be used by an organization that was created at the insistence of the United States Department of Homeland Security, then you're on the right track.

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[flagged]
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Strong counter-evidence: they ask why.
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that's an observation, I guess... OP set up a pi-hole so it's not a stretch they would do a quick search for "free privacy dns". you make it sound like it takes some kind of reprioritization, why?
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Today we are one of the lucky 10k
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