Private Internet Access offers a whole lot of privacy for a small amount of money. It’s extremely fast, secure, unblocks Netflix USA, allows torrenting, and has a clear no-logs policy. Making it a great VPN for those looking for an economical alternative to NordVPN and CyberGhost.
Pros
Jun 28, 2019. A ton of features for just a few dollars a month — Private Internet Access (PIA) gives you an anonymous VPN service designed for both novice and experienced users.Setup takes less than 5 minutes and its intuitive interface makes using this VPN super easy. Download PIA now. If you’re looking for a VPN for streaming or torrenting, you’ll need a service with unlimited bandwidth.
Cons
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Basic:
Functionality:
Technical:
PIA has the right features available to help you achieve full online anonymity. It’s significantly safer to use than others, despite it being a US-based VPN. All modern VPN and encryption protocols are available in a simple-to-use interface.
Logging
PIA is very transparent about its logging policies and even goes so far as to release regular reports. These are reassuring and allow users to see how many data requests the company has received from all the government agencies.
What separates PIA from many other VPNs is the amount of verifiable information that you can dig up about its logging practices. PIA states that it doesn’t collect anything aside from email addresses and payment details. This allows for maximum anonymity when using third-party online payment services.
It’s one of the few VPN service providers that had their servers seized by Russian authorities and subpoenaed by the US federal government and still managed to protect user identities. It’s reassuring that there are actual court cases that anyone can look up online that demonstrate PIA’s commitment in this regard.
Jurisdiction
PIA falls under the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. It is a US-based VPN provider, which means that all data collected can be subpoenaed at any time and shared between the US, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada.
Because it falls under this jurisdiction, PIA may not sound like the ideal choice for anyone that wants to remain anonymous in their online activities. However, due to the clear no-logging policy, it is safe to use.
![]() Encryption
PIA offers two types of encryption in AES-128 and AES-256. Both are available within the client although you will have to set it to AES-256 manually if you want to.
The VPN also offers multiple security protocols, such as IKEv2, L2TP, OpenVPN, and WireGuard. WireGuard is a newer protocol mainly developed for boosting download speeds. However, it’s a bit too new and not as proven as OpenVPN, which remains the gold standard.
Data Leaks
When using the main PIA desktop client, we didn’t manage to find any DNS leaks, or IPv6 leaks, or even WebRTC leaks.
However, there have been some WebRTC leaks when using PIA browser extensions. Due to its private DNS servers and strict DNS protection protocols, all DNS requests are processed by PIA rather than the internet service providers.
Therefore, there’s a rather low risk of data leaks when using PIA. At least as far as the desktop client is concerned.
Extra Security Features
Although PIA may look like a lightweight app on the surface, it does have robust security features. The VPN kill switch is one of the most important, as is the split tunneling and port forwarding features.
The built-in tracking protection and malware prevention features are also important when browsing or when using torrent clients.
But what’s perhaps most important is the customization factor. PIA allows you more control over the security protocols and the level of encryption. For example, you can use the default RSA-2048 authentication algorithm.
That said, you can also use stronger authentication crypto keys such as RSA-4096. It’s just a matter of manually selecting a different protocol. There’s of course the relationship between higher levels of security and app performance.
PIA has inconsistent speed test results. It excels at local and short-distance connections but falls short on an international scale. That said, it doesn’t have high latency issues.
Therefore, it is a stable VPN for a variety of online applications. It’s also worth mentioning that it lists over 3,000 IP addresses spread across 44 countries and 64 cities.
Local Speed Tests
We were testing from Europe on a base of connection of 90 – 100 Mbps.
Local speed tests conducted within Europe show some very impressive results. From an average speed of 90Mbps, going through PIA only resulted in a 3 to 4Mbps drop.
The ping saw a marginal increase, not enough to affect online gaming experience.
This makes PIA very fast for local or short-range connections, which is especially useful for gaming, HD and 4K streaming, and P2P filesharing.
Global Speed Tests
Using PIA on long-distance connections was in line with most VPN. The distance had a fairly significant impact on download and upload speeds, as well as latency.
For example, connecting from Europe to the US, or vice versa, may see a 60% drop in download speed Not as much for upload speeds though.
It gets worse if you’re trying to connect to Australia or Singapore, where the download speed can go down as much as 60% and 70%.
That said, with high initial download speeds, these drops may not be enough to hinder your ability to stream HD movies and such. But it may be too much for 4K streaming services.
Streaming
PIA is a great VPN if you want to unlock Netflix US, Netflix Germany, and BBC iPlayer. However, unlike other Netflix-friendly VPNs, this app doesn’t provide access to other popular Netflix libraries such as Australia, the UK, or Japan.
Unblocking other streaming platforms such as Hulu, HBO Go, Sky, or Prime Video hasn’t been too reliable. But it does seem to work with the Amazon Fire TV stick. It’s also worth mentioning that PIA doesn’t feature any streaming optimized servers. Any US or UK server should work just as well for Netflix and BBC iPlayer.
That said, it’s not the best overall streaming VPN due to its focus on only two platforms and specific geographical libraries.
Torrenting
Torrenting is a breeze when using PIA. The app provides unlimited bandwidth, port-forwarding, and the no-logging policy is great for data protection. Furthermore, P2P filesharing is allowed and the app is compatible with popular torrent clients such as uTorrent, Deluge, and BitTorrent.
What makes it even better, in our opinion, is the built-in ad blocker in the PIA client. This should prevent malware infection and any trackers from gathering data. Both can be serious possibilities with modern torrent clients.
Of course, PIA also offers a kill switch feature, should your connection to a server be severed at any point.
Censorship
While PIA may be great at bypassing some geographical restrictions it’s not yet the best tool for bypassing serious censorships. Interestingly enough, PIA does enjoy a small amount of success with Chinese users. However, most reports and tests show that the app performs inconsistently.
Most of this has to do with the lack of obfuscation tools for disguising VPN traffic. However, PIA works well in other censored regions such as Russian and the UAE, and maybe even Turkey.
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DNS Leak Test
IP Leak Test Web RTC Leak Test Speed Test
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You can grab the latest version of the PIA Mac OS X app from the client download page of their website. Go to the top of the site and click on “Support” and then “Client Download & Support”. Now you want to click on the “Download” button in the Mac OS X box on the page to follow. This will bring up a dialog window that will let you save the Mac OS X client installer (.DMG file) to your computer. The Mac OS X client requires OS X 10.8 or newer. The client setup page also has manual setup guides to configure Mac OS X to use their service with OpenVPN, Viscosity, L2TP/IPsec + PSK, and as a last resort if nothing else works PPTP.
Once the client is downloaded to your computer, open the .DMG file and double click the Private Internet Access Installer.app. Once the installer app finishes, you will see a screen similar to the one below.
Enter your “Username” and “Password” from your welcoming email. It you have forgotten your password, you can click the “forgot password” option to start the process to reset it. You can also choose to set the following basic options:
Once you have set these basic options, then click the “Save” button and the client will finish launching. We will discus the advanced options later in this section. The client does not have a graphical user interface. It simply loads into the menu bar as an icon and looks like the image on the left below. Clicking on the icon will display a list of locations that you can connect to. Notice, “Disconnect” has been greyed out but “Connect” and all the locations are selectable. This indicates that you are not currently connected. The middle image shows that there are other locations that you can connect to by selecting “More”. Selecting “Connect” will connect you to our last used location. Clicking on any of the regions will connect you to that location. The last image illustrates what the client looks like when you are connected to the Private Internet Access network. Notice, “Disconnect” is the only choice that you have. The check mark next to the icon also indicates that you are currently connected to the PIA network.
There are a few more list items in the client shown above. The last list item “Exit” closes out your connection and shuts down the client. The second, “Send Slow Speed Complaint” will let the technical support staff at PIA know that they have an issue. The first is “Settings” which will open the settings window which we looked at in the beginning of this section. We are now going to take an in-depth look at the advanced features that the PIA client offers. These are accessed by clicking on the “Advanced” button on the basic login-settings screen that we examined previously.
The two advanced settings screens are shown below. The one that we want to examine first is on the right below. This is the advanced connections settings screen. The setting options that you can choose are as follows:
Connection type – Their are two types of connections possible with the OpenVPN protocol over IP.
The links shown under port forwarding, VPN kill switch, and IPv6 leak protection will take you to guides on the Private Internet Access website which contain more detailed information about that particular setting. Clicking on the “Encryption” button in the image on the left below will replace the connection settings with the encryption options as shown in the image on the right below.
The encryption screen has the following settings that you can modify:
The Mac OS X client defaults to AES-128/SHA1/RSA-2048 which should provide the best balance of performance and security for most users. Clicking on the “default settings” link will take you to the VPN encryption page on their website.
Below are some endpoint encryption settings along with helpful suggestions for their use or non-use.
Pia Internet Download
Pia Windows 10
The Private Internet Access Mac OS X client may not be the prettiest VPN client in the industry today, but it offers some of the most advanced features that are available to VPNs like a kill switch, disabling IPv6 Internet traffic, and small packets. This makes it appealing to the more technical users. At the same time it has a simple mode that is best for most uses. All that is necessary to connect to one of their VPN servers is to select its location from the list that appears when you click on the client icon in the menu area. It does not get much easier than that.
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December 2020
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