The standard is called oblivious DNS over HTTPS (odoh). It’s meant to help anonymize the information that’s sent before you even make it onto a website.

When you type in a website’s name, your computer asks a DNS server to translate a name like’theverge.com’ to the site’s actual IP. The DNS server will send it back, and your computer can load the site.

This is the problem CloudFlare and Co are looking to solve with odoh. The system lets whoever runs the DNS server know about every website you’re visiting. There’s nothing stopping them from selling that data to advertisers.

The proxy acts as a go-between, sending your requests to the DNS server, and delivers its responses back without ever letting it know who requested the data.

Doh is a standard that’s been around for a couple years. It uses encryption to ensure that only the DNS server can read your requests. By using doh, then routing it through a proxy server, you end up with a DNS server that ca n’t tell where it came from.

The DNS server wo n’t be able to keep a log of which sites you specifically are visiting. Just hiding your DNS may not keep them from building a profile of you.

Staying private online is n’t something you can achieve by setting up a single tool. Anonymizing your DNS requests is a brick to add to your privacy wall when the technology becomes available.