Quad9

Quad9 is a nonprofit organization for the purpose of operating a privacy-and-security-centric public DNS resolver.

9.7/10

How we calculate ratings →

Handling

Does the policy allow personally-targeted or behavioral marketing? No

10/10

Does the service allow you to permanently delete your personal data? N/A

5/5

Does the service allow third-party access to private personal data? No

10/10

This may come in the form of outright data sharing or by using local third-party analytics software (such as Google Analytics, which collects a plethora of user information).

Note that whether the policy allows sharing aggregated user data does not affect this question.

If the personal data is encrypted when it passes through the third-party, it does not count as third-party access (as the data is inaccessible to that party).

If personal data has been made public by, for example, posting it to a blog, it does not count as private personal information (and is therefore not considered by this question).

Score

Yes

The policy allows sharing personal data with third parties (not just critical service providers), and does not explicitly list the third parties.

Yes, all parties specified (including non-critical service providers such as advertisers)

30%

Yes, not all parties specified (but only to critical service providers)

70%

Yes, all parties specified (only to critical service providers)

80%

100%

Citation

Except as described in this Data Policy, Quad9 does not intentionally share, sell, or rent individual personal information associated with the requestor (i.e. source IP address or any other information that can positively identify the system using our infrastructure) with anyone without your permission.

Quad9 DNS Services generate and share high level anonymized aggregate statistics including threat metrics on threat type, geolocation, and if available, sector, as well as other vertical metrics including performance metrics on the Quad9 DNS Services (i.e. number of threats blocked, infrastructure uptime) when available with the Quad9 threat intelligence (TI) partners, academic researchers, or the public.

Quad9 DNS Services share anonymized data on specific domains queried (records such as domain, timestamp, geolocation, number of hits, first seen, last seen) with its threat intelligence partners. Quad9 DNS Services also builds, stores, and may share certain DNS data streams which store high level information about domain resolved, query types, result codes, and timestamp. These streams do not contain IP address information of requestor and cannot be correlated to IP address or other PII.

When does the policy allow law enforcement access to personal data? N/A (no personal data to share)

5/5

Score

Always

This includes cases in which law enforcement either runs the service or has a known backdoor into (or relationship with) the service.

Not specified

When reasonably requested

60%

Only when required by a court order or subpoena

80%

N/A (no personal data to share)

The service would have no personal data to share with law enforcement.

100%

Never (special legal jurisdiction)

The service operates in a jurisdiction in which sharing data with law enforcement is never required.

100%

Citation

"It may be required by law, litigation, legal process, and/or legally binding requests from public and governmental authorities within or outside your country of residence for Quad9 to disclose your personal information."

"Quad9 believes that privacy and control of your personal information is critical to your trust and therefore to the success of the system. Quad9 does not store PII IP address data on permanent storage methods (disk) or transmit that data out of the datacenter in which the query was received. All logging and inter-datacenter traffic is encrypted. Quad9 makes available encryption between clients and the Quad9 system to further protect against data interception or modification."

Transparency

Does the policy outline the service's general security practices? N/A

3/3

Score

Somewhat

The policy provides only a very vague overview of its security practices.

30%

Yes

60%

Yes, including audits

"Reviews," "monitoring," etc. also count as audits.

80%

Yes, including independent audits

Independent "reviews," "monitoring," etc. also count as independent audits.

100%

N/A

The service doesn't collect any personal information.

100%

Citation

Quad9 believes that privacy and control of your personal information is critical to your trust and therefore to the success of the system. Quad9 does not store PII IP address data on permanent storage methods (disk) or transmit that data out of the datacenter in which the query was received. All logging and inter-datacenter traffic is encrypted. Quad9 makes available encryption between clients and the Quad9 system to further protect against data interception or modification.

Is the policy's history made available? Only the date it was last modified

3/5

Does the policy require users to be notified in case of a data breach? N/A

7/7

Will affected users be notified when the policy is meaningfully changed? N/A

5/5

Collection

Does the service collect personal data from third parties? No

10/10

Is it clear why the service collects the personal data that it does? N/A

10/10

Does the service allow the user to control whether personal data is collected or used for non-critical purposes? N/A (no data used for non-critical purposes)

10/10

Does the policy list the personal data it collects? Yes, exhaustively

10/10

Score

The policy does not claim to not collect personal data, but it also doesn't provide any meaningful insight into the types of personal data it collects.

Only summarily

The policy uses overly vague language to provide a summary of the types of collected personal data.

30%

Yes, generally

All general categories of collected personal data are listed, though not all types of personal data are explicitly mentioned (for example, the list might use a phrase like 'such as' when listing types of personal data).

70%

Yes, exhaustively

All types of collected personal data are listed specifically

100%

N/A (no personal data is collected)

100%

Citation

As an open DNS resolver, there is no signup or requirement to disclose PII to us other than that which is provided by accessing the service. The only method by which Quad9 can identify end user requests is by the IP address of the client. IP addresses may represent individual persons or devices, or they may represent (via NAT or forwarding resolvers) large groups of end users. Quad9 does not and cannot distinguish between single and multiple users behind a single IP address. [...] Our normal course of data management does not have any IP address information or other PII logged to disk or transmitted out of the location in which the query was received.
[...]

When you use Quad9 DNS Services, here is the full list of items that are included in our logs:

Request domain name, e.g. example.net
Record type of requested domain, e.g. A, AAAA, NS, MX, TXT, etc.
Transport protocol on which the request arrived, i.e. TCP, UDP, and encryption status of the protocol
Origin IP general geolocation information: i.e. geocode, region ID, city ID, and metro code
Protocol version IP address – IPv4, or IPv6
Response code sent, e.g. SUCCESS, SERVFAIL, NXDOMAIN, etc.
Absolute arrival time
Name of the Quad9-operated machine that processed this request
Quad9 target IP to which this request was addressed (no relation to the user’s IP address)

We may keep the following data as summary information, including all the above EXCEPT for data about the DNS record requested:

Currently-advertised BGP-summarized IP prefix/netmask of apparent client origin
Autonomous system number (BGP ASN) of apparent client origin

Last Updated

May 26, 2021

Sources

Source #1 ↗

Contributors

ibarakaiev, doamatto