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The IT company Mullvad’s founder Daniel Berntsson is behind a giant donation to the populist Örebro Party, which advocates “comprehensive re-immigration” from Sweden. “It’s sad that it’s needed,” he told Flamman.

~ https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropartiet/

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[-] Maroon@lemmy.world 140 points 8 hours ago

God bloody dammit. I genuinely LOVE Mullvad and have tried to use their (not so cheap) services. I feel in this economy, privacy comes at a price and I was happy to do this.

Now, I realise my money is going to fund a POS far-right asshole.

Proton supports Trump.

Mullvad suports the far right.

Is there any major privacy respective service provider that isn't a bloody cunt?

[-] Sanguine@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 5 hours ago

Can we stop with the "proton" supports trump. This has been echoing since the tweet. I understand the initial recoil, I had it myself, but proton as an entity very clearly does not support trump.

[-] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 29 points 4 hours ago

By that logic, Mullvad is fine too, because the entity doesn't support the far right. You are just sending your money to the company which pays the people that do... so...

[-] Sanguine@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 4 hours ago

I mean I'm okay expanding that logic here as well for consistency. This is all on a spectrum, one of Mullvad's top employees donates millions to far right politician is on the more extreme end of that spectrum than a tweet that failed to read the room.

Taking your counterpoint even further, if you found out some low level employees at any company used a portion of their paycheck to support far right politics would you boycott? Obviously not, which should show you that you don't believe this should be a binary decision.

To be clear, I feel mullvad crossed the line here, my point was that the proton hate doesn't compare and is overblown.

[-] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 hours ago

Proton itself sponsored a fascist influencer in france like just a couple weeks ago... You can pretend that having a MAGA CEO doesn't have anything to do with that, and that they would have stopped the sponsorship and caught their "mistake" without significant public backlash if you like, but the dots are connecting to a lot of us watching.

Also, nice strawman, but are they paying the low level employee enough to donate literally millions of dollars? Probably not. Does that low level employee have direct influence over the company? Probably not.

The idea that you stop using Mullvad because the founder personally made a donation to right-wing extremists, but you are fine with using Proton that sponsors fascists and has a CEO that platforms far-right extremists talking points is bonkers. The claim that you are separating "the entity" from the "people" doesn't even hold water.

[-] Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 5 hours ago

Fuck me, this is gonna ruin mullvad, I hope. Never saw it coming though, wtf?

[-] Z745812939054@lemmy.zip 55 points 7 hours ago

also thought mullvad was legit. also want to know if there's any alternative

[-] artifex@piefed.social 14 points 6 hours ago

I’ve semi-seriously been thinking about bootstrapping a VPN service just to have one “not an asshole” service (and that’s setting the bar low - I’m definitely an asshole, just not that kind of asshole). But I’m also a US citizen living in the US, so not the best choice for the job either.

[-] SCmSTR 14 points 7 hours ago

If you build it, they will come

[-] TWeaK@lemmy.today 11 points 7 hours ago
[-] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 hours ago

I originally stopped using IVPN because of slow speeds. Has that improved?

[-] scytale@piefed.zip 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Are you able to get through geo-restrictions on streaming services with IVPN? They have fewer servers than Mullvad it seems. Like for Singapore, they have 2, Mullvad has 5. In Japan, they have 1, while Mullvad has 9.

[-] khannie@lemmy.world 1 points 51 minutes ago

Number of servers is less relevant than users per server.

Mullvad is a much bigger company so I'd expect them to need more servers.

[-] scytale@piefed.zip 1 points 22 minutes ago

It is, when you want to evade geo-restrictions. More servers spread over different IP blocks means there’s more chances the streaming services aren’t aware of some of those IPs yet, so they aren’t blocking them yet.

[-] HelloRoot@lemy.lol 1 points 4 hours ago
[-] TWeaK@lemmy.today 27 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Signal was kickstarted by the CIA, so dissidents in regimes they wanted to topple could communicate securely, but at least that seems genuine.

Matrix was an Israeli spy company's invention.

Telegram is Russian.

Reddit started out as the creation of Aaron Schwartz, but he got demonised and committed suicide. Then it was left to that shit eater spez, who sold his soul to the Epstein crowd making Ghislaine Maxwell a powermod among others, also hosting r/the_donald and bridging Trump's popularity from 4chan into the mainstream. Now he sells everyone's data to Google, while still not paying the manufacturers of that data anything.

TrueCrypt got shut down because it was too cool.

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago

Man, after his death Aaron Swartz has gone from an early employee of Reddit, to a founder of Reddit to now the creator of Reddit. Give it a few years and he'll have provided the VC money for it too.

[-] phase@lemmy.8th.world 3 points 4 hours ago

And Veracrypt?

[-] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 18 points 7 hours ago

Do you have Signal confused with TOR?

[-] TWeaK@lemmy.today 6 points 7 hours ago

No lol but I guess they did it twice?

It was in the news a year or few ago that the CIA was ceasing its funding of Signal.

[-] whaleross@lemmy.world 6 points 6 hours ago
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
305 points (100.0% liked)

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