Enough Already: Whole-House Tracker Blocking (Premium)

If you’re serious about privacy and security, you may want to investigate adding whole-house tracker blocking to your home network. There are numerous products and services to accommodate this need, and while most have probably at least heard of Pi-hole, there are cost-effective service-based solutions that are less difficult to set up and manage. And I’ve been testing one such solution, called NextDNS, since last week.

Looking at the comments from the last two articles in this series, Enough with the F#*!ing Ads (Premium) Enough Already: First Steps (Premium), I’m not surprised that some readers have other choices. But these services are all similar, from what I can see, and I find NextDNS to be both effective and inexpensive.

There is, however, one issue, but that may have worked to my advantage: the mesh networking system I’m still using, Google Wifi, is not fully compatible with NextDNS (and, presumably, similar solutions). That is, if I’m reading the NextDNS knowledge base correctly. (For example, here.) (And, unrelated, I really need to consider replacing Google WiFi with a more modern mesh network based on Wi-Fi 6E.)

What this means is that I need to manually configure NextDNS on each of my devices. This would normally be a bit of an issue, but I’m mostly interested in using this service on my mobile devices anyway. That cuts down the amount of configuration dramatically, to just a few phones and tablets.

On the many PCs I use---I’m in the middle of reviewing several PCs as I write this---NextDNS isn’t necessary. I use the Brave web browser, which already blocks web-based trackers, and I’m not super-concerned about desktop apps like Word or Adobe Photoshop Elements. Besides, at least one reader told me that NextDNS (and, I assume, similar services) can prevent our new OpenWeb-based commenting system from working properly and I obviously need to use that each day.

And there’s one more thing to consider: while configuring a service like NextDNS directly on a router certainly has its advantages, that won’t help when you take your devices outside the home. I use my phones out in the world every day, obviously, and the iPad when I’m traveling. So having that configured directly on each device will protect them---and me---no matter where we are.

To test the efficacy of NextDNS, I configured it on two of my phones, the Pixel 6a I recently reviewed and the iPhone 13 Pro, and on my iPad Air, which I use each morning to read the news. This involves downloading the NextDNS app from each platform’s mobile app store and then configuring the devices to use NextDNS for DNS in Settings. It only takes a minute on either platform.

And with that out of the way, I just used my devices normally.

And that’s kind of the neat bit: they all do work normally, at least so far. I wasn’t sure if this kind of thing would trigger errors on some sites or in some apps, but so far, so good.

In fact...