Cloudflare’s new DNS service speeds up surfing, maintains your privacy

MANILA, Philippines – It’s not just Facebook that’s keeping tabs on user data. Chances are, every online service, from Google to your local internet service provider (ISP), asks for a little bit of your data to provide you with what you want at any given point in time.

To combat the ISP side of this, website performance and security company Cloudflare announced on Sunday, April 1, it was releasing a new tool, a free domain name system (DNS) service called 1.1.1.1. 

The 1.1.1.1 DNS service is Cloudflare’s attempt to increase internet connection speeds while maintaining your privacy by preventing internet service providers from collecting your browser history.

Users who switch their DNS to 1.1.1.1 will allow Cloudflare to take over resolving the process of matching a website address – such as facebook.com – with its Internet Protocol (IP) address – which, in Facebook’s case, is 157.240.18.35.

In its announcement post, Cloudflare also said the new service would be committed to going beyond not using browsing data to help target advertising. “In fact,” the company said, “we knew we could go much further. We committed to never writing the querying IP addresses to disk and wiping all logs within 24 hours.”

Cloudflare has said they have an interest in making browsing faster for everyone. The primary business of Cloudflare is making its clients’ sites operate fast. By combining Cloudflare with 1.1.1.1, access to Cloudflare sites is made even faster, all while touting improvements to speed and privacy across the web for people adopting the DNS service the company has prepared. 

The company has also promised the service is not an April Fool’s joke. Rather, it’s a bit of geeky humor as April 1 (4/1) is akin to 1.1.1.1.

A full guide to setting up the DNS service on your router, computer operating system, or mobile operating system, is available here. – Rappler.com