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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 01 2015, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the there-goes-the-neighborhood dept.

We just talked about Personal Info being Private Unless the holder Decides to Sell It on SoylentNews. Today we were treated to yet another such a situation, and this time it hit close to home.

El Reg Reports that OpenDNS is in the process of being acquired by Cisco. And the OpenDNS founder's Blog confirms it.

Cisco will essentially take over total ownership, and the vague promises of continuance of OpenDNS. The blog to the contrary, no promises of terms of service after the acquisition can be believable.

OpenDNS managed to sneak in a Sales clause into their Privacy Policy somewhere along the way:

OpenDNS does not share, rent, trade or sell your Personal Information with third parties, except...

(4) it is necessary in connection with a sale of all or substantially all of the assets of OpenDNS or the merger of OpenDNS into another entity or any consolidation, share exchange, combination, reorganization, or like transaction in which OpenDNS is not the survivor; you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our Web site of any change in ownership or uses of your Personal Information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your Personal Information.

That privacy policy has grown more permissive over the years, allowing OpenDNS to sell filter lists used by their customers, or just about anything else they might want to do.

Full Disclosure: In my day job we were a paying customer of OpenDNS. We had an ISP that ran unreliable DNS servers, injected ads in 404 pages, and generally was slow. We tried Google's DNS free service, and found it quite fast, but full of re-directs and other objectionable features. We switched to OpenDNS mostly for ad, and website filtering, phishing site blocking, and Speed. We were very happy with the fast service over the years. So reliable we never had to look at the web site.

But we were shocked at the extent of permissions creep in their Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. We thought we were avoiding Google's DNS mining service. Little did we know...


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @01:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @01:09PM (#203743)

    OpenDNS is dumb.

    Most of the people lamenting its demise have never used it--nor do they even really know what it is. Read this, for starters:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS [wikipedia.org]

    So it's a DNS service for which you must pay, or else see ads. It provides anti-phishing mechanisms.

    OpenDNS is dumb.

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  • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:21PM

    by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Wednesday July 01 2015, @02:21PM (#203773) Journal

    Not exactly correct. The article you linked to clearly states:

    OpenDNS provided an ad-supported service[4] "showing relevant ads when we [show] search results" and a paid advertisement-free service.

    So as long as you don't use them for your searches, you don't see ads. I've been using them for years at work for simple (free) DNS filtering with no ads, but it is questionable if it will remain so now that Cisco is buying them.

    I suppose it is time to look into my own DNS server and filtration.

    --
    "It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson