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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

I love how everyone comes down on Google for collecting data about net traffic, as though no other company on the internet ever thought of collecting traffic metrics. What is your current DNS provider's policy on DNS data collection? In the case of OpenDNS, sure, they have a privacy policy, but they also proxy Google's results and serve up ads. How's that so much better?

I'm perfectly happy to have my DNS data be collected (which I assume my ISP is already collecting) in exchange for ad-free, fast name resolution. Plus, now I don't ever need to look up a DNS server again, Google's is 8.8.8.8. Sweet.

EDIT: looks like Google's not collecting so much information anyway. http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy.html

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Looking at that privacy policy, and it looks like exactly what they should be doing. There isn't much of a point in keeping personally identifiable information beyond a certain point, at least not something which directly leads back to you.

The only data analysis that would benefit from keeping identifying information would be to create a model for how users go about the internet, and google already has some very good models of that. This is just conjecture, but I would assume that being able to create geographic based models is far more useful than per-user models, which is something they keep.

> Plus, now I don't ever need to look up a DNS server again, Google's is 8.8.8.8. Sweet.

My DNS servers have been 4.2.2.[1-4] for a long time. They aren't that hard to remember.

I tried using those servers, and they didn't work. If I do an nslookup or dig through them, it's fine, but when I use them as the default nameservers in my network configuration, they seem to reject my requests.

Anyone know why?

Don't know. I usually set them as the default DNS servers for my router to hand out through DHCP.

Try `nslookup -vc [hostname]` after setting your name servers to the Level3 IP.

Just a wild guess. I can't remember off the top of my head if nslookup or dig, when specifying an alternate server, use TCP or UDP. But, if it uses TCP for those, then it's possible that your ISP is blocking UDP DNS traffic that's not destined for their DNS servers. It wouldn't be the first time.

Weird. It works now, unlike the last time I checked. Something must have changed, but I don't know what.

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