Apple and Cloudflare team up to develop better Internet privacy protection methods that can prevent Internet Service Providers (ISP) from monitoring the websites you visit.
Your ISP can see the websites you visited in the past several days. This is a fact that some ISPs do not want their subscribers to know. While you have no intention of visiting scandalous sites, it is not comfortable to know that someone from your ISP knows the website you visited yesterday or the day before that. It is perhaps because of this fact that Apple and Cloudflare joined hands in developing better Internet privacy protection methods, something that would prevent ISPs from knowing or monitoring the websites you visited.
Apple and Cloudflare team up to stop your ISP seeing which websites you visit https://t.co/LDrN6bkNGb by @benlovejoy — 9to5Mac.com (@9to5mac) December 8, 2020
At present, when you type a web address on your browser URL field and press enter, the address immediately goes to a Domain Name Server (DNS), which then checks the address and looks up the domain name. When it finds a match, it then converts it to a numerical IP address required for your computer to connect to that IP. Since your ISP controls that DNS, it has means to know who you are and which websites you entered on your browser's URL field. For some, this is a privacy intrusion, which is perhaps why Apple and Cloudflare teamed up to develop better Internet privacy protection protocols or means to prevent your ISP from knowing which websites you recently visited.
In some instances, your ISP sells the privacy data it collects to advertisers, which include knowing your IP and the IP of the website you visited. Industry observers say preventing your ISP from knowing which websites you recently visited is among the reasons why Apple and Cloudflare joined hands in developing improved Internet privacy protection protocols. For instance, you are trying to find out the price of a product and the place where you can buy it. ISPs can take note of this query and send the information to the maker or distributor of the product you are looking for. Advertisers can then make intelligent guesses on what type of products you may want, which means you have now become a subject of targeted advertisements.
Some ISPs claim that they would have no way of knowing what websites you recently visited since most DNS queries go through encryption processes. Industry observers, however, disagree, saying that even if there is an encryption of DNS queries, the company operating the DNS service still has the means to see the data. According to TechCrunch the new DNS protocol that Apple and Cloudflare are currently developing, would improve Internet privacy protection methods, and prevent your ISP from determining which websites you visited recently.
Called by Apple and Cloudflare developers as Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS (ODoH), the new protocol improves Internet privacy protection by making it more difficult for ISPs to know the websites you recently visited. Developers explained that ODoH applies another layer of encryption around the users' DNS query, and then sends it through a proxy server. The proxy server then functions as a go-between you and the website you intend to visit. Since the DNS request is encrypted, the proxy server would have no way of knowing what is inside, and at the same time, functions as a shield to stop the DNS resolver from discovering who sent the query.
