When you connect to a VPN, as well as proxying your traffic and setting the corresponding updates to your routing table, it may also provide you with different DNS settings. On paper, this was a reasonable idea. Traditional DNS requests (for example, where a website is resolved to 172.31.5.172) are transmitted in the clear, so even if the operator of a DNS server (typically one’s ISP) doesn’t know the web page a client is looking at, they at least are aware of the server it’s on. This is known as DNS leakage. You may use another DNS server (such as Cloudflare’s easy-to-remember 1.1.1.1 public offering), but again this is only viable if you trust that operator more than your ISP.
ISPs may also
