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.”
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.