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.”
I made the switch to IPVN and it’s felt exactly the same. Maybe even better. Same price. Servers in multiple locations. Allows routing through 2 VPN servers. No logs. No money going to racist ideology.
Mullvad can claim whatever they like about their values, but they are a for-profit company. The profits of the company are being used to fund racial segregation. If they believe in their values they’ll switch to a non-profit foundation. Until that time they can get fucked!
Is IPVN owned by a non-profit foundation?
Nope they’re owned by a single person. I hope he’ll be more responsible. If you know of any non-profit vpn providers let me know! Happy to switch again
I had hoped you had any examples since you pointed out that it’s a for-profit company :/ Can’t do IPVN either than since who knows what the owner uses their money for.
All I know is the profits of Mullvad go to bad causes. Yes IVPN aren’t perfect but the services are so similar the choice should be obvious. Until a better alternative comes along i’m going to use the one that does less harm.
I’m curious if they offer port forwarding? That feature has been keeping me on PIA despite ethical concerns
AirVPN does port forwarding, and they’re less dodgy than PIA. Proton also does but there’s some questions raised by the CEOs support of Trump (still less dodgy than PIA though)
The CEO didn’t support Trump: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
The CEO made an official statement and then the official Proton account doubled down. Praising Donald Trump and JD Vance and insisting, at the time, that the Republican party would be the better party unless Democrats did something about it.
I’m familiar with this link though. It’s the most suspicious, anonymous, intentionally incomplete, poorly written, AstroTurf-looking thing I’ve ever seen before. (How AstroTurfy? Proton officially uses it as a reference. So it gets extra scrutiny.)
I suppose we read different things, because what they said is that republicans aren’t “friendly with big tech” and that’s a good thing. There are other blog posts where they explain their position in detail, like https://proton.me/blog/trump-control-nsa-privacy
Yours doesn’t load for me.
You may be familiar, but you refuse to argue on its merits and sources, of which there are plenty.
And by the way, if we were to talk astroturfing, there are a handful of accounts in this community that consistently post negative comments about Proton. I’m not saying this is an orchestrated attack against them, but it’s really damn suspicious that in every topic tangential to privacy or VPNs, there’s always someone mentioning how awful Proton is.
Hard to critique me if you can’t open the links to see what the official accounts say, and your anomymous Proton-backed blog post doesn’t mention it either. Here’s a relevant snippet they disappeared.
- Proton_Team on Reddit, January 2025
Your link is to a 2016 blog post that says, in large font,
So forgive me if I don’t think this is exonerating evidence, but rather something that resembles Proton moving from a more modest both-sides stance to attempting a very partisan one.
The “it doesn’t matter” part of the blog post is also dangerously inaccurate, implying any privacy violation in Switzerland is illegal while, in reality, Swiss authorities have gotten Proton to disclose user data several times in high-profile incidents. Here’s the biggest one in my mind. And another and another.
At the time it was true, corporate dems were way more likely to be in bed with big tech. That’s just a fact.
Ah, I remember you now. You’re the guy who thinks that privacy equals absolute immunity from court orders! That’s never the case and will never be.
Oh no… It’s you. I actually thought you believed the blog post and didn’t know better. Because its assertion about Swiss law is the opposite of yours right now.
You can’t say Proton is legally mandated to violate privacy while pushing a Proton-backed page that says
Because this is absolutely wrong, and you knew as much.
But even if that nonsense wasn’t in there, the failure to mention the official Proton Team response in the blog post would be enough. Now I know you’re familiar with it, but here it is for anybody else who hasn’t seen it.
https://archive.is/LlbSj
Damn that’s the only thing they don’t offer compared to the others 💔