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So I would argue that it's healthy to be a little concerned about the people who follow you around online,
be it the government, unscrupulous advertisers, or maybe your crazy ex who swears she'll never love another man.
But even if you've taken all of the obvious precautions including hiding behind seven proxies,
browsing only in incognito mode, whole drive encryption, and stationing an attack dog outside of your computer room,
unfortunately, there might still be an insidious hole in your defenses that could expose a fair amount about you.
I'm talking about DNS leaks.
And if you don't know what the DNS is, you can check out our other video right up here on how it works.
But simply put, it's the system that matches web addresses you enter, like youtube.com, to numerical IP
addresses so that your web browser will know which site to bring up.
And
now typically, whenever you try to visit a new website, your computer will ask a DNS server maintained by your ISP for its IP address.
Now this means that your ISP knows which sites you're visiting, which normally wouldn't be an issue,
but if you're doing something sensitive, you may not want your ISP to have this information,
especially if they're logging it indefinitely or, much worse, selling it to third parties.
Oh, but come on John, that's amateur hour stuff.
I use a VPN that I pay
actual money for, so I'm totally safe, right?
Well, maybe not.
Depending on how your VPN is configured, it might be using a secure encrypted tunnel to connect you with the websites themselves,
but the DNS request to help you navigate to those sites might still be going to your ISP's DNS server.
Now this is because some operating systems, and Windows is notorious for this, will rely on whatever DNS server it is saved as the
default. So if this is your ISP's, it might completely
ignore the fact you have a VPN running and send all of your browsing requests to your ISP anyway.
Now, they won't see exactly what pages you're visiting or the contents of a message you type,
but they can build a shockingly robust profile of your online life based on just this information alone.
So how can you plug these pesky leaks?
Well, if you are using a VPN you trust, the most straightforward way is to enable its anti-DNS leak feature,
which will encrypt and route all DNS requests to the ISP.
So how can you plug these pesky leaks? Well, if you are using a VPN you trust, the most straightforward way is to enable its anti-DNS leak feature, which will encrypt and route all DNS requests to the ISP.
After turning this setting on, you can test it as a site that checks for any remaining leaks to see if it's functioning properly,
and we'll put a link to one of those sites down in the video description.
And even if you're not using a VPN, you can still route DNS requests through different servers if you don't trust your ISP.
There are a number of publicly DNS servers out there that you can find with a little research.
Two of the more notable ones are run by Google and CloudFlare.
To set this up just bring up your IPv4 settings under
Ethernet properties in Windows and enter the IP addresses of the DNS servers
you'd like to use. Though Windows 8 and 10 users should note that a new feature
called SMHNR, that's a mouthful, anyway, well it could still route your request
through your ISP, so we've linked a plugin that can disable it in the video
description if you're using a VPN. And well-regarded public DNS servers can
have other benefits. For example, Google claims that their service only keeps
logs of users' IP addresses for 48 hours before deleting them, provides speed
improvements in many cases, and encrypts your DNS requests as well. Of course, no
matter who you use, you're still trusting essentially some rando, just not your ISP.
To be respectful of your privacy, so read their privacy policies thoroughly. You
don't want to spring a leak somewhere else, or else your request for privacy
will end up feeling kind of like a boat ride in a pasta strainer. And speaking of
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