![]() These records must be made available to local law enforcement or government officials as required by local laws. Different countries have different laws about privacy, Internet use, encryption, censorship and so on.įor example, some countries require all online services, including VPNs, to keep detailed records of where the users go online and what they do. Since VPNs exist to provide online privacy and security, where they are located can make a big difference. We haven’t seen any recent complaints about this issue, but if the Kill Switch is important to you, we suggest you contact PIA Support and ask about this before licensing the product. There was a bit of controversy about the PIA Kill Switch in 2018, with some users reporting that the switch failed to reliably disconnect their computer from the Internet under certain circumstances. However, the Kill Switch is not enabled by default. The Kill Switch is software that automatically disconnects your computer from the Internet if the VPN fails. To deal with this problem, the best VPNs include a Kill Switch. That exposes your IP Address to anyone who happens to be looking. Typically if the VPN connection fails, your computer will revert to its normal connection to the Internet. Testing shows that PIA prevents all three of these types of leaks.Īnother situation that could cause your IP Address to leak is if your connection to the VPN fails for some reason. Without going into too much detail, there are three types of leaks: IP leaks, DNS leaks, and WebRTC leaks. You want to be sure that your VPN never exposes that information on the Internet. Your IP Address can be used to identify your specific computer or mobile device, making it relatively easy to identify you. This encryption standard is considered “military-grade” as it is used in the most secure military and commercial applications. PIA supports several of the most popular encryption techniques, including AES-256. Others are too hard to crack but have weaknesses built into them called backdoors that allow anyone who knows how to use the backdoor to easily decrypt the messages.Īnd others are, as far as we know, uncrackable within any reasonable amount of time and free of backdoors. Some are now obsolete in that computers have become powerful enough to quickly crack their encryption. VPNs employ various encryption techniques. In theory, only your computer and the VPN can read packets that are encrypted. Before encapsulating message packets for tunneling, the VPN software on your computer or in the server encrypts the message packets. To deal with this problem, VPNs use encryption. But someone with the right software who can intercept the VPN packets flowing back and forth can extract the original data packets. Then compare your test results with the data in this April 5, 2019, Consumer Reports article discussing the download speeds needed to stream different types of multimedia content.Ī few rounds of testing in typical situations where you would use PIA should give you enough information to decide if this VPN is fast enough for you.Įncapsulation provides one layer of protection for the messages flowing between your computer and the VPN. ![]() To find out if it will be fast enough for you, we recommend that you take advantage of its 7-day money-back guarantee to run some speed tests using your devices and your ISP in the locations where you are most likely to be using the VPN. ![]() These results imply that under most circumstances, PIA will be fast enough for most users. Given this, it was surprising that PIA was one of the slowest VPNs among those tested. The VPN Comparative Test report showed PIA to have better latency ( ping), streaming, upload, and download speeds than most of the VPNs tested. It ran a large set of tests on a dozen VPN Services, including PIA. In 2018, one of PIA’s competitors commissioned a company called AV-TEST GmbH to do some independent testing. Where you connect from, when you do it, and which ISP you use for the tests are just some of those factors.įortunately, when it comes to PIA, we have some independent test results we can use to answer the speed question. Discussing the speed of a VPN Service is always tough since it depends on so many factors. ![]()
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