Google has a long history of capturing users data using a search engine, browser and DNS server. This article explains how and why you should avoid Google DNS.
From the article:
I honestly think most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Even if they have some inkling along those lines, I still imagine many think of the data they leak only in terms of individual facts, such as their name or where they ate lunch. What many people don’t realize is how revealing all of those individual, innocent facts are when they are combined, filtered and analyzed.
Cell-phone metadata (who you called, who called you, the length of the call and what time the call happened) falls under this category, as do all of the search queries you enter on the Internet.
For this article, I discuss a common but often overlooked source of data that is far too revealing: your DNS data. You see, although you may give an awful lot of personal marketing data to Google with every search query you type, that still doesn’t capture all of the sites you visit outside Google searches either directly, via RSS readers or via links your friends send you. That’s why the implementation of Google’s free DNS service on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is so genius—search queries are revealing, but when you capture all of someone’s DNS traffic, you get the complete picture of every site they visit on the Internet and beyond that, even every non-Web service (e-mail, FTP, P2P traffic and VoIP), provided that the service uses hostnames instead of IP addresses.
- Read more: Own Your DNS Data