Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden’s national elections for the first time.
Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled “Immigration,” “Political individualism,” and “Moral individualism.” Before that, he had not posted since 2019.
The flurry of posts follows weeks of customer criticism over the donation – for example, Finnish blog Moonwriting’s post “I’m done with Mullvad.” Another blog, Unutterable, is more direct: “Mullvad funding the far-right and the problem with tech company ownership.” The Hacker News discussion thread about the donations has reached a remarkable 1,784 comments so far.
Mullvad was co-founded and is still jointly owned and run by two CEOs, Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg. Its name, as reflected in the company’s logo, is Swedish for “mole.” It also offers the Mullvad Browser, a privacy-enhanced fork of Firefox ESR co-developed with the Tor Project. Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman (“The Flame”) revealed the donation in its story “High-profile techie gives millions to the Örebro Party.”
In a post on X, the company said it was devoted to freedom of speech and tolerance, saying: “It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.”
What VPN do lemmy users recommend? Mullvad founder is funding right wing politics. Proton ceo is praising Trump. PIA has deep ties to Israeli intelligence.
NYM seems promising, they are trying to build a decentralized VPN with multiple nodes, same as TOR but faster, so no one has full data who talks to who and what type of traffic.
However it’s only been around for a year, so we still don’t have enough data if their approach works or not compared to traditional VPNs.
iVPN is a good one, it has been around for 15 years now, and is also privacy and FOSS focused like Mullvad.
However they lack some security features that Mullvad has: DEITA, diskless servers etc.
Ultimately I would say go with:
NYM if you want to gamble (high risk high reward),
Mullvad for good security, but yeah your money goes to a far-right party in Sweden,
iVPN: worse security than Mullvad, but more trustworthy than NYM, and your money doesn’t fund right-wing populism
Try tunnel bear perhaps?
Im still happy with my proton vpn. I mainly use the CLI on Linux and it works well and is fast. Might be an inpopular advice on Lemmy / Fediverse, but im still happy with Proton
I like Proton, but that seems to be controversial these days.
Maybe AirVPN is an option? By their own words it was started by activists to imrpove anonymity and net neutrality. It is quite a bit less ‘sleek’ than proton or mullvad, but I have found it to work fine (you might have to try several servers before you find one that works for you if you want to get around geoblocking, as some of their IPs appear to have been blocked here and there).
Leaving this recommendation to see if someone replies with news on how they suck as well, because I have not really checked if there were any controversies surrounding them
I’m sure they suck too, but at least they allow heavy port forwarding?
How do they suck? Sounds flimsy to be sure about something without providing evidence or really any arguments.
I’m assuming they suck because they are a VPN company, see this thread for more info. I said that tongue in cheek though, I use air and I’m happy
Is Windscribe in bed with any lizard men?
IVPN
IVPN is based in Gibraltar, which is a British Overseas Territory and whose laws are the same as Britain except were Gribraltar passed their own laws to override it.
Unless proven otherwise (by finding actual laws passed in Gibraltar to block it) treat any VPN based in Gibraltar as being subjected to the same kind of secret mass surveillance orders from Information Courts as those based in Britain.
Just great, there are barely any good alternatives to mullvad
Jurisdiction doesn’t matter, it’s an myth spread by Protonmail marketers so everyone thinks their privacy is ensured by some strict Swiss privacy laws.
Although privacy laws are pretty mild everywhere. Even GDPR is quite outdated and is barely enforced.
Proton, Tuta and others do it because “Swiss privacy” or “EU-based” brand is much more recognizable and easier to sell people on, compared to “we do metadata obfuscation” or “here is our 50 page long security audit”.
However, what actually matters more is security architecture. Signal is US based, but they thought through how to retain as little data on users as possible, so when FBI asked them for info, Signal could only give them date of account registration, user ID, and last login.
TLDR ignore country of registration and HQ location, evaluate on the merits
I don’t know about Proton. I don’t judge people by what they say, but by what they do. Mullvad is putting its money where it’s mouth is. It doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people who use Mullvad also use Brave.
The whole “Proton CEO loves Trump” is just another Reddit overreaction as far as I know.
He applauded Trump for an appointment he made to crack down on Big Tech. Yes, it’s very doubtful any actual crackdown would ever happen, but I also don’t see how it makes Yen a MAGA supporter.
He also kept digging when the backlash hit. It wasn’t a great look, and the initial take was, at best, deeply naive.
That said, I’m actually considering switching to Proton over this. I think his statements are nowhere as bad as this Mullvad donation and I’m in the slow process of de-Googling and Proton’s other offerings would be a huge step towards that. It probably isn’t great to have email and calender and passwords and cloud storage and VPN all through one company, but it’s better than two with one being Google.