I found "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug to be a helpful guide. As an engineer who was shy to approach product design, I felt the language really helped demystify things.
There are at least two ways of looking that make using 8.8.8.8 sense.
First is that if you assume that Google has a decent profile of you anyways (from other services), then feeding in DNS data to Google would have relatively minor impact on your privacy.
Second is that at least Google is relatively competent and restrictive in providing any of the important data to 3rd parties, whereas other providers (like your ISP) is more like to sell the data wholesale left and right.
Both are sort of "better the devil that you know" ways of thinking.
> Second is that at least Google is relatively competent and restrictive in providing any of the important data to 3rd parties, whereas other providers (like your ISP) is more like to sell the data wholesale left and right.
While this is true (of all the entities trying to gather my data I'd expect Google to be one of the least likely to leak it - after all, no matter your preconceptions, Googlers are usually pretty good at what they do) it's at least somewhat moot because while your ISP (or, say, MasterCard) is more likely to sell your data, Google is more likely to be buying that data (from, say, MasterCard). If any basket acquires more than a certain percentage of my eggs (or footprints), I start to get uncomfortable.
According to Google [1], they keep client IP addresses and DoH headers for up to 48 hours and then strip them after that, and don’t use the logs for any personalization.
Everyone else here is assuming you can’t trust what they say, but it’s worth pointing out that, if they’re telling the truth, none of the rest of this privacy discussion matters.
Sure, which is why Oblivious DNS would be a nice upgrade. One less thing to worry about.
But I expect that, compared to 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1, the user experience will be unaffected, and there will be no measurable improvement in user privacy. (Because we have no way to measure it unless something bad happens and it can somehow be traced back to one of these DNS services.)
Unfortunately, if you don't have permission to download then you may be committing piracy. In this case, entire countries apparently don't have permission.
If the system is guessing location based on IP address, then granting permission based on that guess, then I expect their permission grant should be valid. How would a user know that they have bugs in their permission system?
If you connect directly first, are told "no", then bypass the system with a VPN: You probably understand that you aren't supposed to have access.
What will happen if you commit this type of piracy? I don't think there's a loss of revenue, or damages so pursuing pirates likely isn't worth it.
If you connect over a VPN with the purpose of circumventing geoblocking, it could be judged equivalent to copyright infringement in many jurisdictions.
If you just default to connect over VPN and weren’t aware that by doing so you now have access to content you otherwise would not be allowed to access in your area, you’re in the clear.
One of the unexpected benefits for me has been that I can lock any OAuth enabled app to a container for the OAuth provider I use. To login, I check which container I'm in and click the associated button.
Before this I'd always forget which OAuth provider I previously used. Did I Login with Google to DigitalOcean or did I use GitHub? Worse, I'd often click the wrong button and get logged into a new/empty account. I never came up with a good rule for which OAuth provider I should use, so it's a guessing game.
Locking the app to the container means I don't really need to think.
Same MacBook, same SSD upgrade. I haven't replaced the battery, I tend to stay near an outlet anyway. Debian and Ubuntu work great on it, so I moved off OSX.
