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Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN Announces Completion of Independent Audit by Deloitte
Published on August 31, 2022
- PIA has once again proven that it doesn’t store user activity logs or metadata.
- Its network architecture is explicitly designed to prevent data retention.
- The latest independent audit was done by ‘Deloitte Audit Romania.’
Private Internet Access (PIA) has become the latest VPN provider to go through an independent audit and prove its no-logs policies. More precisely, PIA gave access to its server environment to Deloitte, one of the “Big Four” auditing firms, in order to confirm that server configurations align with the VPN’s internal privacy policies.
As per Deloitte’s findings, as seen by TechNadu’s team, Private Internet Access doesn’t store any types of logs that could reveal any personally identifiable information, at any point. In other words, PIA has no way to identify its users’ activities or collect such data in any manner.
More precisely, Deloitte has reported that Private Internet Access does NOT store or share any of those following user information: incoming and outgoing traffic information, including user and destination IP addresses, browsing history / websites visited, amount of data transferred, the VPN servers used, DNS queries or files downloaded.
To prevent any traces of user activity, PIA has disabled all error logs and debug information from all services running on their VPN traffic servers. Also, PIA’s servers run on RAM only (configured to reboot routinely), which means no hard drives are used. As a result, all data is immediately deleted with every reboot or power outage.
The only real-time information that PIA keeps track of is hardware usage information (CPU load, memory used, etc.) and the raw number of users currently connected to the server (but not their IPs, identities, or activity).
On top of that, PIA’s allocation of dedicated IP addresses is also anonymous. That system is a token-based system that is saved only in the client, which isn’t enough for a server-side association. Even PIA doesn’t know which dedicated IP you end up with - if you decide to use this add-on for your subscription.
We’ll also add that the results of this latest audit don’t come as a surprise. PIA is among the most transparent VPN services overall, proving its commitment to its users many times over. The VPN was subpoenaed multiple times in the past, showing that it had no data to share. Also, PIA’s apps are open-sourced, meaning anyone can inspect their code.
Check our hands-on Private Internet Access VPN review to learn more about this VPN service. And to know what else to expect, here’s what’s new in PIA VPN.