Yesterday, Google announced its latest service: Google Public DNS. This service appears to be similar to the also-free OpenDNS.
While Google claims that they are doing this to make the web faster and safer, which I believe is true, one cannot deny that Google, the world’s largest advertising firm, is doing this to get more information about you. This is yet another in a series of ways that Google will have to track your every move on the Internet.
Is this a victory for the end-user? Perhaps. This service will make DNS more visible in the public eye, and using it will most likely enhance end-user’s DNS performance and security.
But it is surely yet another defeat in the Google vs. Privacy battle.
They claim they won’t correlate and dispose of data after 2 days. It’s at least better than the promise Comcast has given me.
The more I’ve thought about it over the last few years, the more I am convinced that the privacy battle is lost. I think that those of us that are protecting data by trying to keep it out of the hands of others are rapidly coming to a dead end.
I think that, instead, the meaning of the term “privacy” is going to shift from referring to having control of personal information to having control over the access to that information. In other words, the data is out there, and there’s no getting it back under control. However, I don’t care (hypothetically) if my social security and credit card numbers are floating out on the Internet. I care if they are used for nefarious purposes.
Similarly, I don’t care if Google gets my DNS data. After all, they already have my search data and some of my email data. Instead, I would be worried if they used it to do me harm. Thus far, I see indication that Google is going to do this or, in fact, has done anything like this in the past.