Your ISP can still see everything, even with encrypted DNS—here's what actually stops them

Encrypted DNS sounds like an easy privacy win if you set it up correctly , and it is, but please don't treat it as some bulletproof, foolproof solution that hides everything you do from everyone who might want to know. In fact, it doesn't hide your browsing from your ISP.

Your ISP still carries the connection, so there's still a lot of information on the table. But if encrypted DNS isn't the fix here, then what is?

Encrypted DNS only protects the lookup

Your browser still has to connect somewhere

DNS is everywhere, and it comes in the moment you type a website address into your browser, because your device needs to figure out what IP address belongs to that domain. And traditionally, those requests -- because that's what they are -- are sent in plaintext. As a result, your ISP or another network operator can see what you're asking for.

For some, this isn't a problem, but for the more privacy-inclined of us, this isn't great. Realistically, I do know that my ISP has better things to do with their time than to spy on what I'm doing, but well ... the more time goes on, the more I value my online privacy. I digress.

DNS over HTTPS (DoH) and DNS over TLS (DoT) encrypt those requests. This prevents anyone along the path between you and the website from reading them. Neat, right? But this is just one small part of loading a website.

Your browser still has to establish a connection to that server. Unsurprisingly, as that traffic happens online, it goes through your ISP.

The bottom line here is that encrypted DNS may prevent your ISP from reading that DNS request itself, sure. But it can't conceal the rest of your connection, because your browser still needs the internet to load the website contents in the first place.

Your ISP still has access to a lot of information

The destination IP never disappeared

Just like you probably don't want your work laptop to let your employer explore your home network , it's only natural that you'd rather limit what your ISP can see. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, your internet service provider can see a whole lot, encrypted DNS or not.

First and foremost, the ISP can see destination IP addresses of every service and website you connect to. It also knows when those connections happen and how long they last, plus how much data goes in either direction (in/out).

Many variables make it so that the ISP may not be able to cleanly see every single website you visit. For instance, an IP address doesn't always map to just one website. But the ISP still gets a boatload of info on your browsing patterns, and encrypted DNS alone doesn't conceal all of that. In fact, all the things I mentioned above are unaffected by encrypted DNS.

Running your own DNS server doesn't fix this

Unbound can't hide the traffic leaving your house

Online privacy is like layers upon layers, so if we're digging deeper, self-hosting your DNS sounds like an obvious next step. But does that fix your problems here? Nope, but you can still try it out anyway.

Doing this means replacing trusting your ISP's resolver or using Google or Cloudflare with running something like Unbound, which will then resolve domains recursively, and it's especially good when used with Pi-hole or AdGuard Home, as that gives you some extra control over logging, filtering, and local DNS.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good setup, but the caveat remains the same as before: that traffic still has to go through your ISP if it sits inside your home network. Even when Unbound fetches you the IP address you're looking for, your browser still uses that same internet connection to get you there, so you're not cutting out the ISP in this particular equation. For that, you need to tunnel more than just DNS.

A full-tunnel VPN actually changes what your ISP can see

The ISP sees the tunnel instead of every destination

This brings me to what I truly think is the solution here: a full-tunnel VPN.

What this does is it basically encrypts your entire traffic, not just the DNS portion of things. You no longer connect directly to every website or service, because the VPN sits there in between you and the target, receiving that traffic first. Your ISP will still know you were using the internet and when, but they won't know what you were doing online -- not to the same extent. It won't be served a full list of destination IPs, at the very least.

The VPN server works as your exit point to the internet at large, and its jobs are aplenty, including receiving encrypted traffic and forwarding it to the website you're trying to reach. The response goes back the same way -- through the tunnel -- so you've effectively moved from having to trust your ISP to trusting whoever operates the VPN server. In the end, you still have to trust someone, but you don't have to use a commercial VPN for this. You can self-host the exit point instead.

Self-host the exit point, not just the resolver

A cheap VPS can become your private way out

Hold up, hold up, I'm not done yet! If you want even more control, all you need is a cheap VPS, which replaces having to pay for a commercial VPN provider. (By the way, commercial VPNs are often quite good about no-logs policies, so your traffic is pretty okay anyway -- but still, it's not the same thing.)

The way this works is you rent a small virtual server and then install something like WireGuard on it. You then configure all your devices to use this VPS as their full-tunnel VPN endpoint, and with Tailscale, you can configure the VPS as an exit node. When this is all done, your normal internet traffic and your DNS requests travel through the encrypted tunnel before reaching the internet at large (read: your ISP).

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Encrypted DNS adds privacy but doesn't replace everything else

Encrypted and private DNS aren't some kind of fix for everything that could possibly go wrong. Instead, encrypted DNS is one piece of a very large puzzle. In the end, it's down to you how many pieces of that privacy puzzle you're going to put together before you throw the rest out, and every little step helps. The above is a path to follow if you're really privacy-conscious and want to go the extra mile.