New Feature Request: Pause VPN
This might sound like a bit of a stupid feature request, but how about baking in the ability to pause VPN for a short period of time, like a minute, two minutes, five minutes, etc.?
I suggest this because no matter what, sometimes you cannot get to a website at all through PIA VPN because it is blocked, but you still need to get through anyway, e.g., buying baseball tickets on the team's website.
I mention pausing the VPN because, sometimes, I turn it off to go to the site, then I forget to re-engage it, and then I spend a lot of time, sometimes hours, surfing around until I realize I'd forgotten to re-engage PIA.
If this is not a good idea, or someone else has a better suggestion, please post.
I suggest this because no matter what, sometimes you cannot get to a website at all through PIA VPN because it is blocked, but you still need to get through anyway, e.g., buying baseball tickets on the team's website.
I mention pausing the VPN because, sometimes, I turn it off to go to the site, then I forget to re-engage it, and then I spend a lot of time, sometimes hours, surfing around until I realize I'd forgotten to re-engage PIA.
If this is not a good idea, or someone else has a better suggestion, please post.
Comments
In my view it's ridiculous that, with PIA, I can't whitelist a few urls (banking, paying my AT&T wireless bill, Craigslist, etc.) that won't accept connections from vpns that are known to have abusive subscribers (PIA unfortunately being rather high profile that way). If I forget to disconnect from PIA before attempting to login to my bank account I'm immediately hit with a list of security questions which I must successfully answer or risk being locked out of my account (and it's happened to me more than once -- talk about a great way to ruin your day). I and many other PIA customers have asked for it many times in the past several years -- it's called "bypass" or "routing." But like so many other requests it's just been ignored or dismissed entirely with some "It's not technically feasible" excuses.
Recently Max-P gave what, on the surface appears to be, a credible reason for why PIA can't do it. At least he stepped up to the plate and responded, which is far more than I can say for so many others. Yet oddly enough there are several vpn providers who include routing as a standard feature in their apps. One of them provides it an open source app which can, therefore, be audited (and apparently has been) to validate that it doesn't have any of the problems that Max-P hypothesizes.
I'd be the last person to call Max-P a liar. So believing he is telling the truth one can only conclude that, while it's technically feasible for a few other vpn providers to selectively bypass specific urls, with PIA it's not technically feasible, which evidently is due to their own inherent technological shortcomings.
Those who, like me, consider selective routing an indispensable feature will have to, as I have, look elsewhere.
I already explained everything I know in the post you linked, so I'm thinking either they really made an amazing job and I'm really curious to see how they pulled that off or they just do the DNS thing which works but is dangerously unreliable and not something PIA would adopt.
So, if PIA were ever to do the OP's feature, I would add an option to pause for 10 seconds, or 15 or 30 seconds, just so I can send my emails and then quickly reconnect automatically.
(P.S.: I have been offered the email whitelisting option, but that's got limited appeal to me since I funnel seven different Gmail addresses, all of which have a specific purpose, through my Outlook. So please do not suggest that in a reply.)
Thank you for the suggestions! I would recommend also submitting them here, this will go straight to our team for review.