Been trying PIA for a week now, first few days it worked decently (only issue not reaching even 250 Mbit down), but lately literally any google site blocks ALL of PIA’s IPs. Borderline unusable
Update: Personally, I am happy with simply downloading the chrome extension and letting google.com be whitelisted. Thanks for those suggesting it.
PIA simply doesn’t work and I’ve requested my money back. PIA is by far the worst product I’ve ever tried. Borderline scam
Yes. Use DuckDuckGo instead.
Any VPN that tries to play the game with Google to get around it will get burned. There isn’t an infinite amount of IP addresses - and it’s way easier for Google to put an IP behind a captcha than for the VPN to acquire a new IP.
Yes… yes it is… ALL VPNs get blocked by Google… try a better search engine.
Google wants to spy on you. PIA makes it much harder to do so.
But honestly Google sucks these days. Trying using perplexity for search, you’ll never go back.
You can whtelist Google sites to not go through the VPN. Or just use Kagi instead of Google.
Yes, but why are you using google search through a VPN? Use split tunneling.
So it’s safe to say that you are using the shared dynamic IPs from PIA which were good when they first started but, as with anything Google does, it starts to collect data and has been building comprehensive lists of those shared dynamic IP addresses that you are randomly assigned when connecting to a VPN server (not just PIA but any VPN).
So what do you do?
You either use a privacy aware tool like DuckDuckGo or if you have other reasons for needing a dedicated IP address, use PIA’s dedicated IP address addon service. This assigns you your own IP address which is non-traceable to you.
How?
PIA generates a token you redeem in the user portal, when you redeem that token, it assigns you a dedicated IP address that only you can use. PIA doesn’t retain any logs as a standard policy so even if they were compelled to, they cannot link a dedicated IP address to a certain user. All PIA would know is which dedicated IP addresses are being used (but not by who) and which they have to offer on their service.
A dedicated IP address will not be on the Google watchlist meaning you won’t get flagged as “suspicious activity” and have to complete their captchas.
You just don’t know how to pick 53 images of a traffic light, don’t take it out on us
that started to happen years ago…use duckduckgo and you will be fine…
unless you have a private IP, yes.
Use Brave search, it’s Google but better.
Can you whitelist the Google app and search from that?
i feel like this is absolutely not something that should be happening for any paid vpn. i’ve never once had this issue on any vpn when signed in to google, and will only occasionally get a captcha, that just requires one click.
Complain to Google? They’re the one actively blocking the searches.
Here you go:
Also found as extension.
Pay a little extra for a dedicated IP.
DDG for the win. But I do miss Google Maps web because Apple Maps web is lacking.
Damn, my setup is the reverse. It’s mostly browser traffic I feel like tunneling.
Can’t remember google being this anal 3-4 years ago when I used NordVPN.
How do I whitelist individual websites? Browser extension I assume?
Yes, browser extension is needed and very easily negates this. Thanks above comment.
PIA just simply doesn’t work. Chargeback issued. PIA is a scam
Doesn’t work as split tunneling is broken in PIA app.