OpenDNS Phases Out Redirection To Guide

First time accepted submitter Jim Efaw (3484) writes "Tired of the OpenDNS Guide surprise from website-unavailable.com when you go to an old link or a typo from some ISPs? Relief is at hand: On June 6, 2014, OpenDNS will stop redirecting dead hostnames to Guide and its ads; the OpenDNS Guide itself will shut down sometime afterwards. OpenDNS nameservers will start returning normal NXDOMAIN and SERVFAIL messages instead. Phishing protection and optional parental controls will still stay in place."

Re:If you read in between the lines

[davidu]

Nope. Never. We've never sold our data. We've never even used it for marketing purposes internally.

We've only ever made money from one of three things: Ads, selling individuals an ad-free version, and enterprise security services.

Today, most all of our revenue, and all of our growth, comes from selling enterprise security. If you work in IT, it's worth checking out to improve your security posture. There's a lot more to it than you might guess.

-David

Re:Business model

[davidu]

Nope. Never.

We wouldn't make such a case for turning off ads if this was our business model going forward. You could visit our site and see how we make money. We sell security services. We never could have done it without first being a consumer service, but we're not selling your data. Come on.

-David

Re:Business model

[davidu]

We have been building a data privacy and data usage policy document that we plan to release soon.

One of the many, many reasons to turn off ads is that we had to share some potentially personally identifiable information with ad partners (indirectly when making ad requests, they would just see it in the ad request), so by turning off ads, our privacy / data policy will be a lot more clear and will not need to have weird "certain third parties for certain services" kind of language to address the advertising business.

We're waiting to turn off ads, we'll get the document cleaned up, and we'll publish it.

-David