104 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2019
WORKING MAC REVIEW: PRIVATE INTERNET ACCESSpossible. For some countries there is only
one region option, while others such as
the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada,
and the United States, have multiple
options with ping times for each.
PIA doesn’t offer much in the way of
extra services. The only thing other than
the various connections is PIA Mace, an
ad, tracker, and malware blocker. This
feature is off by default, but you can turn it
on at Settings → Privacy. There’s also a
VPN kill switch that shuts down your
internet connection if you lose contact with
the VPN. That way your online activity
won’t be revealed outside of your secure
connection. It’s a nice feature, but
remember these features are not 100
percent effective at hiding your true
location from third parties.
PIA offers more than 3,000 servers in
32 countries. It supports up to 10
simultaneous connections at once, which
is fantastic. Most services offer up to five
or six maximum. Ten is more than enough
to cover most people’s devices at home.
PIA is owned by London Trust Media,
which is based in Denver, CO. Its chairman
is Andrew Lee and the CEO is Ted Kim (go.
macworld.com/tdkm). PIA doesn’t keep
logs and writes all user data to /null, a
directory that doesn’t exist—meaning the
data is discarded. This promise has been
tested in court twice, and both times PIA
proved to be unable to provide any PIA’s expanded view on Mac.