cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49722402
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.”
Any suggestions for a similarly priced, similar quality alternative for windows and Android? I tried Nord before I switched to Mulvad and it was worse, don’t want to go back to that
There are not any.
If your use case doesn’t prioritize your own safety then tell me what it is and I can help you figure something out.
I’m trying out ivpn, and find it a viable alternative so far (comparing a Mullvad Wireguard config vs. ivpn app, on resp. Linux & Android)
The critical part is: how many supposed “quality” alternatives have been proven not to do any logging? Mullvad has been proven to be solid. They were raided and had jolly little to hand over to authorities on their customers.
How many of the other VPN services can say that about themselves?
In which ways did you find Nord worse? I found Nord faster than Mullvad and better at spoofing my location in different countries for streaming services.
Proton VPN is probably the first other one that springs to mind as offering privacy comparable to Mullvad. Its CEO was criticized last year for making approving comments about some things Trump was doing in the USA, but it was mostly about opportunities to challenge big tech companies, and he claimed not to be a MAGA supporter in general. There was no evidence, as far as I know, of him donating to right-wing organizations.
Proton vpn is pretty good, except on Linux where the client is horrendous. The Killswitch is very unreliable there. When it fails, it sends your machine right back to the internet instead of blocking the connection completely like it’s supposed to.
I haven’t found an alternative that works well for me in Linux other than mullvad unfortunately. And I really don’t want to give them my money.
I sent proton a nastygram but they don’t seem to care about the Linux client at all.
Also both their gui and cli apps have dependencies on Gnome, and installing gnome fucked up my remote login setup. It’s insane to me that even the cli relies on gnomes keychain
I’ve seen airVPN thrown out before, not a huge fan of their UX though
It’s also very slow to the point of being unusable.
I’ve been using airVPN for years and have never had speed issues. I will agree with the other comment on their UI/UX though, it’s straight out of the late 90’s/early 00’s. But once you’ve got it setup you don’t ever have to deal with their website.