Last week, Private Internet Access introduced

Private Internet Access MACE™ in v60 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as well as our latest Android and iOS mobile apps.





Many of our users have asked about the specifics of the MACE™ ad blocker, so we are breaking down the technical details so our users can know that they are safe.





When you are connected via the Private Internet Access client, PIA handles all DNS requests on your behalf. It is because of the valued feedback and feature requests from our loyal customers that we decided to implement a basic and privacy-conscious ad blocker.





Turning on MACE™ causes your DNS requests to be resolved by a special DNS process

that has been set up with a simple blacklist of known advertising or malware domains. PIA doesn’t do anything besides block domains associated with advertisements, trackers and malware at the DNS level. For instance, website owners might have noticed that they have had issues accessing Google Analytics while MACE™ is turned on.





Unlike some ad blockers, we do not inject any SSL certificates or analyze your traffic in anyway to identify ads. Additionally, because of the way our VPN service is setup, we are unable to do a man in the middle attack or perform any content analysis on the traffic flowing through our servers.





We hope that MACE™ shows the privacy community that PIA is forever committed to our users’ privacy.



