Going to ground

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Let’s Encrypt over the past few years, most websites are now served over HTTPS. This provides two things: authentication and privacy. Authentication in the sense that you can be sure that the website you’re looking at isn’t some kind of forgery, and privacy in the sense that communication between you and the webserver is encrypted.

As such, HTTPS more or less thwarts the ability of a passive middleman to see which pages are being viewed, but out of technical necessity your DNS provider – usually your ISP – needs to see the domain name, and your ISP needs to see the IP address it) DNS queries.