For the first time, we are opening up the floor to you! Here is your chance to ask PIAās product designers and engineers your questions about the PIA product, service, and VPNs in general!
Your questions will be answered by PIAās Head of Product, Himmat Bains, and Senior Engineers, Juan Docal and John Mair.
Submit your questions in the comments below till the end of day January 17th. Answers will be published here on January 24th.
Note: Please know this is the place for you to ask questions about our products, service, cybersecurity topics and VPNs. If you are looking for assistance for technical issues or account/billing based issues please contact our support team directly for assistance or post your issue in a separate Reddit post.
First of thanks for providing such a amazing and trustworthy VPN. Been a customer since 2017 and absolutely love it.
I noticed the transparency report hasnāt been updated since 2023-01-03 even tho you say you release them twice a year? Is there any reason this hasnāt been updated yet? I assume you still got things like court orders in the last year?
Is there any way to see those orders and the result of it. I absolutely believe you arenāt faking those reports, but I would love to be able to see them for myself too and the result of them. And I couldnāt find them on your website.
The āstreamingā servers are showing better P2P throughput. Why is that? E.g London-Streaming is often giving me twice the P2P bandwidth/throughput compared to the āLondonā server. What is the difference between these servers?
Is PIA even considering dropping port forwarding as some other VPNs have? This would be a dealbreaker for my use of it, and I think many others. I realize you might be hesitant to answer if itās on the roadmap, but transparency one way or the other would be really nice.
The browser add-on needs an allowed/ignored list, which will automatically switch the connection on or off depending on the website being visited. Is this feasible?
The SOCKS5 proxy doesnāt seem to work, at least for most of us most of the time. I was using it happily with FoxyProxy for a good long while before it simply stopped working. Are there any plans to improve the SOCKS5 support? Maybe have a selection of such servers available for users who pay a little extra? I would like a US-based one so I can read news articles which would otherwise be forbidden to European readers, but would rather not have to VPN my entire internet connection in the process (I currently use it in split tunnel mode, only VPNing a handful of applications).
Why does the PIA Google Play Store Android app not allow ad blocking, forcing users to download and install your APK file when ProtonVPNās app from the Play Store allows for the users to chose between blocking malware or malware, tracking, and ads?
I enjoy using the Firefox and Chrome extensions regularly. Is it in the works for the extensions to be updated to include more servers to match the desktop app?
I have a bunch of questions, so Iāll just write one long comment.
Do you have any plans on increasing the number of physical servers and decreasing the number of virtual servers?
Will you continue to support port-forwarding? A few other VPNs have stopped and moved to you just because of this, and it would be a dealbreaker for many.
Will you sell or give out stickers in the future? Iād love to have a PIA sticker on my laptop.
Are there any plans to create a UI like Nord or IP-vanish with an interactive map?
Last question:
Will you work on more obfuscation techniques so users in China, Iran, Russia, etc can use your service?
Hey there! You mentioned that Kape is mostly involved on the corp. leadership side but Iām just curious ā how much of the infrastructure etc is managed/shared by Kape as a whole vs being solely run and managed by PIA team members?
I really love PIA and use it on my phone and PC.
The UI is lovely, simple and neat with a timer, indicating how long the VPN is connected. But the Android version lacks the ability to show that timer, within the PIA app itself. In Windows its there in the main screen.
Would you please kindly add such timer in the Android version visible in the main screen?
I love Wiregurd, I hope PIA also soon adds WireGuard over TCP. Mullvad has that since 2021.
ExpressVPN also has its own version of Wiregurd, called Lightway, which has TCP as well.
Having both TCP and UDP versions for Wiregurd, makes connections in restricted countries easier, since one day you see UDP is blocked and one day you see TCP is blocked.
Since in the restricted countries they manipulate VPNs a lot.
Thank you very much. I hope Wiregurd over TCP will also be implemented. There were days I couldnāt connect with PIA, but could connect with Wiregurd-TCP of ExpressVPN.
Again thanks.
FYI: Via PIA, OpenVPN on my mobile LTE provider works but with PC with different provider and wired Ethernet doesnāt work.
ExpressVPN for Android totally dropped OpenVPN.