Safer Internet Browsing With One Change [View all]

[justaprogressive]

The internet is a dangerous place. There are websites that will happily deliver you malware, or display violent or sexual imagery after your child unsuspectingly clicks on a link. While there are lots of ways to protect yourself when browsing online, there’s one quick way to protect everyone who uses your home’s internet network at once, by using something called an alternative Domain Name System resolver.

Every time you tap a link or enter a URL into a browser, that link gets translated (or “resolved”) from the letters you typed in (e.g., Slate.com) to an IP address (e.g., 151.101.130.133). The phonebook of sorts that makes this happen is called the Domain Name System, or DNS. The DNS runs on servers all over the world, known as DNS resolvers. You probably use the DNS resolver run by your internet service provider, if you got the router from them and never changed the settings. (Imagine a guy at Verizon sitting in a room looking up the letters you typed and converting them to an IP address, and then sending you on your way—it’s like that, but a computer instead of a guy.)

The trouble with these default lookup systems is that, often, they are not very discerning: If your second grader types in Pornhub.com, that DNS resolver will go right ahead and resolve that to its IP address, and send your kid out into an area of the internet they shouldn’t yet know about. If you look up a site that will deliver malware to your computer, the DNS resolver may just be like: Yes, go right ahead.

The other thing is: Those internet service providers are seeing everything you look up. If you find this a little disturbing from a privacy perspective, you’re not alone! Comcast is one of the good guys in the space (I was surprised, too). They address DNS directly in their privacy policy, noting, “Comcast does not use Comcast DNS data for marketing, advertising, or sales purposes, and does not sell this data to third parties for any purpose.” Verizon, on the other hand, explicitly states that they do use your DNS lookups to “predict your interests, preferences and other insights we use in the program.” That “other insights” covers, uh, a lot of potential uses.

https://slate.com/technology/2024/12/internet-kids-privacy-use-an-alternate-dns-how-to.html