4

That will get you using their DNS service (which is a big step up compared to the competition, as they don’t keep logs), but it won’t encrypt your request. Anyone can monitor or man-in-the-middle attack your request. They outline why it is important about 2/3 of the way down in their post in layman’s terms (titled “Toward a Better DNS Infrastructure”).

In their words:

DNS itself is a 35-year-old protocol and it’s showing its age. It was never designed with privacy or security in mind. In our conversations with browser, operating system, app, and router manufacturers nearly everyone lamented that, even with a privacy-first service like 1.1.1.1, DNS inherently is unencrypted so it leaks data to anyone who’s monitoring your network connection. While that’s harder to monitor for someone like your ISP than if they run the DNS resolver themselves, it’s still not secure.