Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
I do not find their program on the web. They say they will publish before summer.
Any other official document about their political stances besides that really vague introduction they do on their website?
Thanks for the heads up. Switching to Proton because of this. Mullvad has been bad lately anyways with most of their servers getting blocked every where.
The only thing keeping me on them was their reputation of being a bit less cooky than Proton but this pushed me over the edge
Proton’s CEO praised Trump, just saying. There’s IVPN which is Gibraltese.
Proton CEO praised something Trump did which isn’t a great look but debateable.
That’s wayyy less bad than donating $500k to a Nazi party which advocates for remigration.
It’s not just praise though, Proton claimed Trump was standing up for the little guys which is rich considering that the fascist is a billionnaire, supporting the wealthiest to repress the labourers even more. And besides that, it’s also insane.
Hitler was somewhat an environmentalist, but cheering on Hitler for being that is insane, because that is ignoring all the other heinous shit he did.
What’s worse, cheering on something Hitler did or donating to Hitler?
“Voting with your wallet” in this circumstance, to the extent it has any effect at all, will only hurt you and other privacy conscious people.
No ethical consumption under capitalism, etc.
you don’t need a VPN company to use a VPN. and using the “no ethical consumption” line is pretty fucking gross when you’re talking about buying shit from nazis.
A vpn doesn’t need to be an internet proxy either, but users of vpn companies are paying them to privately and securely anonymize people’s traffic and shield their requests from the isp.
It is of course possible to do this using a vps over connections as well documented and simple as ssh but there are many ways to screw that up and paying a company to work out the details is extremely tempting.
If a person ends up using multiple endpoints, the cost of several vps subscriptions would also eclipse the cost of a vpn service.
I don’t need to pay someone to dig a hole for my pilings either but the quality and speed of their entrenching is beyond what I can create.
I don’t need to pay someone to dig a hole for my pilings either but the quality and speed of their entrenching is beyond what I can create.
ok, but if there is two companies, one that donates to fascists and one that does not, are you gonna tell me you’ll just shrug your shoulders and go with the nazis because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway? like, my dude, what the fuck?
Well out the gate: there isn’t a vpn provider like mullvad elsewhere. I have active subscriptions to several at the moment for different uses and have used at least two dozen different ones over the years as well as maintaining my own tunnels and overlay networks. There are probably lots of people that know more than me but I think they’d agree that mullvad occupies a specific niche that pretty much no one else is in right now.
What politics would a master need to have for you to submit to their will?
What level of need does a person have to be in for it to be acceptable that they buy bread from a Nazi owned store?
So, now everyone’s going to hate Mullvad like they do Proton bc of personal decisions by the CEO??
Yes bit ironically I will switch to Proton since its cheaper and now equal to Mullvad anyway
Not weighing in on their politics, but yes and they should. It’s called voting with your wallet. Where do you think the CEO gets the money to fund their politics? They don’t work for free. By continuing to use that service it’s tacitly okaying the CEOs choice.
Money is power.
They donated a little over 500k usd. Mullvad is $5 a month.
A hundred thousand users would have to drop them to equal the donation, and likely several orders of magnitude more would have to drop them in order to equal the amount of the donation when we factor in what percentage of that $5 goes into the ceos pocket.
If you are correct that money is power then the users don’t have any power to effect changes to this situation.
I think you’re also making a misstep blaming the users of the service for that ceos use of their money. Should now every individual shopper be expected to have an understanding of how the individual members of the owning class each shape the world around them and each shopper bring their political will to bear through the dollars and cents they dole out in the produce section?
“Hmm, bananas are on sale and I could stock up on spices with what I save but on the other hand I don’t like the dole corporation…” preposterous!
Even if you thought the above statement wasn’t absurd, putting expression of politics in the marketplace is choosing to fight on a battlefield tilted entirely in the favor of the wealthy. Consider who will have the advantage when money is political speech, will it be the absurdly wealthy who command vast sums, control the materiel of capital, collude to manipulate the very world we live in and rub elbows with each other on the weekends or will it be a bunch of people choosing apples or bananas?
No ethical consumption is invoked for a reason and this is the reason.
Even if you were a dyed in the wool liberal who truly believes history is over, did you expect the privacy store to be run by someone who shares your politics? People who feel they need privacy might be members of a wide range of ideologies that are outside the mainstream.
Okay? So a hundred thousand users can drop the service. “You’re just a small drop in the bucket” is the same bullshit mentality used everywhere that has gotten the world into a lot of the problems it’s in now.
If everybody does their small part, it’s done pretty quick. If everyone sits around going “oh, there’s no ethical consumption” and accepted defeat, literally nothing changes.
Unions are built entirely on speed together strong.
Yes don’t make it the only battlefield but if you strongly disagree with the CEO, giving him more money is a problem. There’s no way around that.
There are only so many good privacy options out there. So being choosy with services isn’t a luxury many can afford.
I think you should all be less trusting of western tech companies that strictly use infrastructure in countries that the CIA would feel comfortable hanging out & torturing people to death in
Is this not itself a geopolitical statement? Do we judge everything by indidual choices, or acknowledge the place of individuals in a wider structure they may not be entirely aware of?
You add up all we know about 5/14 eyes, comprador states, you couldn’t get a better list of CIA-compatible nations than the Mullvad server picker
Let’s just stop for a second. Cyprus? Israel? Ukraine? I know the justification. But cmon
Okay.
Let me know when it affects the service.
A company that you trust with your privacy (one aspect) has been caught in league with mass surveillance loving fascists? Yeah I am sure that those are a perfect mix and it won’t lead to mass surveillance of its users like the dozens of VPNs now under Israeli mass - surveillance - fascist control.
It is just a complete coincidence that the people pushing more and more mass surveillance are buying up (and in this case winning over the controlling part of) the ways for normal people to avoid mass surveillance.
Neat.
Who made the device you’re posting on?
Av vänstern anklagas vi för att vara fascister och av högern anklagas vi för kommunism
Accused of being fascists from the political left and communist from the political right…not exactly a reassuring description IMO.
Calling nonwhite migrants “parasites” is a pretty clear signal which end of the spectrum they’re actually on.
So, they’re socialists, only national?
so like, national socialists. who do we know who also called themselves that?
So nobody can agree if they’re far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they’re far-authoritarian?
Seems like it yeah
I mean, moderates are invariably SuperHitler, especially in Scandinavia where their social welfare is synonymous with creating apartheid, but I don’t see why that would bother most Lemmy users :0
