I’ve been using AdGuard’s DNS resolver on my Android phone for a couple of months, and I’m pretty satisfied with it.
The idea is that it filters out ad networks at the DNS level, so there is no need to root the phone (nor to install any app). You just put dns.adguard-dns.com in your “private DNS” settings and that’s it.
Recently, though, I’ve seen a couple of people around here mentioning how Adguard is not trustworthy, or “kinda shady”. What’s your take on them? Their privacy policy seems OK to me, but I’d be interested to know more about them.
Not sure how relevant it is but it is a Russian company, I believe. Take from that what you will.
It was founded in Russia in 2009, then moved its headquarters from Moscow to Cyprus almost 10 years ago, in 2014 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdGuard
They’ve been a solid presence in the privacy scene for years now, contributing to spread privacy awareness and not incurring in a single major controvesy/scandal so far.
They’re legit imo, and they provide solid services
Not sure about the basis for the claims of “shadiness”
Cyprus is a tax haven.
It has not been a tax haven in nearly 5 years.
okay then. Cyprus was still a tax haven when the Russian-based company moved there, I’m sure for completely unrelated reasons.
Ah, of course, the privacy oriented company becomes suspicious when it moves OUT of Russia, i see!
Do you have any substance or is this just baseless speculation?
So they’re good with privacy tech and money.
This is my main reason for not using them. I have two Pihole servers running gravity sync, unbound and wireguard on each and VPN my phone back home for self hosted DNS resolution and ad blocking.
+1 for pihole! Stupid easy for linux geeks to setup and maintain, but probably a pretty hard sell for the more general public. A cloud service like NextDNS might be more appropriate for average Joes. I can’t speak to AdGuard since I don’t use it, but I know that name gets mentioned frequently in privacy circles - favorably, I think…
You can easily get pihole running on anything these days.
Well this part with Russian company it is so lol. I am more comfortable giving my dns requests to russia and not to my goverment