Privacy and security are important factors in your web browsing. For your connections to websites, security and privacy is provided through the HTTPS protocol, which negotiates an encrypted connection between your device and the webserver. This connection is protected by encryption algorithms that scramble the data so only the transmission can only be read by your device and the webserver.
These encryption algorithms are what keep your passwords secure when you sign in to websites and your payment details secure when you buy things online. This is why it’s so important to make sure that login pages and payment pages are secured with HTTPS. If you’re only using HTTP, with no encryption then it’s possible for someone to read your messages as they are being transmitted to and from the server.
DNS is the next most important protocol when it comes to web traffic. DNS, or Domain Name System is used to send requests to DNS servers. These DNS servers translate the human-readable domain names of websites into the machine-readable IP addresses that your computer needs to use to connect to the right web server.
Unfortunately, the DNS protocol doesn’t have any encryption support built-in, which means all of your DNS traffic is potentially visible to someone monitoring your connection. This data could be used to determine which websites you were accessing, although not the exact page. Nevertheless, that data could be quite an invasion of your privacy. For example, if you went to the website of a bankruptcy lawyer, it could be interpreted as indicating that you are on the verge of bankruptcy.
To protect the security and privacy of your DNS data, you may want to try using the newer variant of DNS, called DoH. DoH, or DNS over HTTPS, creates an encrypted HTTPS connection to the DNS server, then transmits your DNS traffic over that HTTPS connection.
How to enable DNS over HTTPS (DoH) in Edge
To enable DoH in Edge, you first need to open the settings. To do so, click the triple-dot icon in the top-right corner, just under the “x” button, then click “Settings” in the drop-down menu.
In the “Privacy, search, and services” tab of the settings, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and look a the second to last subsection “Security”. To enable DoH, click the slider for the last option in the “Security” subsection, labelled “Use secure DNS to specify how to look up the network address for websites” to the “On” position.
By default, this will continue to use your default DNS provider which may not support DoH. You can instead click the “Choose a service provider” radio button and then select a DoH provider from the list or enter the details of one manually.
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