When you want to visit a website, you have to enter its web address in plain text format in the address bar of the web browser. What happens next is not really shown to the user. The web browser takes the domain name and asks the system configured DNS server about its IP address. Then it proceeds to connect to that IP address. For this whole process to work DNS servers are necessary. But the system configured DNS servers get data over unencrypted connections and as such there is possibility of data capture by third party like your ISP.
In order to make your online experience much more private and safer, you can switch to secure DNS feature that is being offered by many web browsers these days. Secure DNS accesses DNS servers over HTTPS and encrypts all the data being transferred between your device and the DNS servers.
Here is how you can configure Secure DNS in Chrome browser for Android:
- Launch Chrome web browser in your Android device.
- Tap on the menu icon in the Chrome browser and choose Settings.
- On the settings screen, tap on Privacy.
- Tap on Use secure DNS under the Privacy section.
- Enable the setting Use secure DNS by tapping on its off/on button.
- Select Choose another provider and then choose Cloudflare, Google Public DNS or Cleanbrowsing from the list.
- From now on your Chrome browser on your Android device will use secure DNS instead of the system configured DNS servers.
Sometimes the secure DNS may be slower in response and you will notice some sort of lag when you are trying to open webpages in the Chrome browser on your Android device. In that case, you can follow the same steps and disable secure DNS like before and it should work just like before.