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.”
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