I’ll leave the privacy policy here and let people decide for themselves.

They keep two types of logs. An identifiable one which is deleted in 24-48 hours (dns0 and quad9 also do this) and an anonymized one. There is no mention of “business partners”; and it also says explicitly that the information is not used to target ads.

As the privacy policy and service reads, it is not a honeypot. However, Google generally does not act in good faith, so there’s no telling if they have 100% adhered to the policy.

No matter, to make calculated and informed decisions, we should have all the facts in order.

Like I said prior, there is nuance to be had here.

We agree that Google products are generally a honeypot (good products that lure you in), but which products are honeypots are important.

You very likely want to avoid Chrome, Gemini, and Google Search - but 8.8.8.8 is not a honeypot, it is a loss-leader. You will be lured in from 8.8.8.8 if you say “huh. this is a great service. is there anymore?”, but 8.8.8.8 itself is not a malignant service.

This is a discussion to have with professionals in a professional setting. No one here is responsibly equipped to answer this in a chat forum. This obviously includes me.

That being said, I do not think about the future - live your life second-by-second.

Despite what people say, life is not meant to be enjoyed. We live in a time of lawlessness and over-abundance, so people often equate life with enjoying things. At your core, you are a biological package of electrical circuits and tools. When you do something your body deems beneficial, you enjoy it (as in signals reward your brain).

If you want to enjoy, then a general tip is to return to the fundamentals. Eat healthy food, exercise, explore, learn, and talk to people in real life. If this doesn’t work, then you need to speak with a professional (probably a therapist) to find what does.

Hating humans is not viable, you simply need to stop that. This is not to say let yourself be abused and runover, but you need to form bonds with people - this is our inescapable nature.

Google does not automatically mean bad. It is dangerous precedent to blanket ban and remove nuance.

8.8.8.8 is an excellent service, and provides genuine privacy gains. The largest downside being that it is such a massive target for bad-faith and ignorant actors - like the Italian government.

Tor itself has a pretty good routing scheme that seems like it could replace DNS entirely. There are obvious (but surmountable) UX issues and there may be scalability issues - but it is 100% worth investigating.

Until the community supported platform becomes an advertiser supported one. Remember they said this same exact thing when moving from Facebook to Reddit.

Running is not going to save the online community. People have been running for the last 30 years, and it led us to some of the darkest times we’ve seen in 100 years. Instead we need to fight back and strategically retreat. Change the incentive structure - make advertisers absolutely miserable, and those who leech from advertisers should be similarly flogged.