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.
Dang, Mullvad instantly loses its credibility of the go to lemmy shill VPN overnight.
Regardless of what this dumb party is, it’s first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the “generous” donor might be pushed or bought out.
The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you’re considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.
I don’t use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It’s my experience that if you’re using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you’ll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.
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.
Proton did not claim anything; the CEO of Proton claimed that Republicans (not Trump) would do better on big tech anti-trust.
This view is not that crazy given that the person Trump appointed was doing her job quite well. Too well to the point that Trump removed her from the position later on.
Bullshit, Trump is the most big tech and corrupt claimant to Usonian president since a hefty while.
And Trump IS what the RINOs are nowadays, those that the pro-fascist CEO praised. Republicans are those like Phil Scott of Vermomt.
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?
mullvad occupies a specific niche that pretty much no one else is in right now.
oh I see. you’re not a serious person. there are quite a few vpn providers that are better than mullvad. starting with any that allow port forwarding. mullvad does absolutely nothing that a dozen other vpn providers don’t also do. and if you actually had all this experience you appealed to, then you would know that.
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?
you’re justifying renting a vpn from a nazi by comparing it to buying bread so you don’t starve to death. likely, in your head, this seemed like a good argument. idk, maybe you are some kind of digital being, made of energy, who must consume data to survive. I apologize if this is the case, I must seem speciest for thinking your argument was fucking idiotic.
just fucking admit you don’t see anything wrong with doing business with nazis, you weirdo.
So, now everyone’s going to hate Mullvad like they do Proton bc of personal decisions by the CEO??
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.
I wrote that several orders of magnitude more than a hundred thousand users would have to drop the service to equal the amount of the donation under the logic that only a small percentage of the monthly payment of each user goes into the ceos pocket.
With that out of the way, the idea that I’m suggesting throwing your hands up and saying there’s nothing you can do is a wild extrapolation completely manufactured by you.
Successful boycotts are always accompanied by a program of political action that takes place outside the marketplace. Do not fight in the marketplace, you cannot win there. Boycotts are a form of recruitment that takes place in the marketplace because so much of our social interaction has been condensed to economics.
Boycotts in support of unions are always performed alongside a strike, work stoppage or other direct action, never by themselves. The intent is not to nickel and dime the absurdly wealthy company into compliance but to communicate support for the direct action in the marketplace that we all have to interact with to live.
But how does this impact what the op is about?
There is no direct action going on. There is no competing product (mullvad occupies a very unique position amongst VPNs. I’m not aware of any service that offers what they do with the security posture they have and the history of responding to power at the highest level that they have), and if you know of one I’m interested to hear about it. The boycotter would have to simply go without as opposed to turning to an equivalent competitor. To what end? Would that change the ceos political opinions, which are considered middle of the road in their fascist country of residence?
Declaring a battle on ground you cannot succeed upon to achieve nothing of importance only sacrifices the well being and willingness of those who would take action.
There are only so many good privacy options out there. So being choosy with services isn’t a luxury many can afford.
Yes bit ironically I will switch to Proton since its cheaper and now equal to Mullvad anyway
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
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 nobody can agree if they’re far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they’re far-authoritarian?
Seems like it yeah
So, they’re socialists, only national?
so like, national socialists. who do we know who also called themselves that?
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?
if you don’t care about your privacy, would you mind installing a RAT for me?
From a privacy perspective, who manufactured a device that (potentially) runs free software is different from who runs a service which you have to trust because you’re using someone else’s computer.
Must be kewl to not care like you
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
