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Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/49722402

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."

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[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

In which ways did you find Nord worse? I found Nord faster than Mullvad and better at spoofing my location in different countries for streaming services.

Proton VPN is probably the first other one that springs to mind as offering privacy comparable to Mullvad. Its CEO was criticized last year for making approving comments about some things Trump was doing in the USA, but it was mostly about opportunities to challenge big tech companies, and he claimed not to be a MAGA supporter in general. There was no evidence, as far as I know, of him donating to right-wing organizations.

[-] dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Proton vpn is pretty good, except on Linux where the client is horrendous. The Killswitch is very unreliable there. When it fails, it sends your machine right back to the internet instead of blocking the connection completely like it's supposed to.

I haven't found an alternative that works well for me in Linux other than mullvad unfortunately. And I really don't want to give them my money.

I sent proton a nastygram but they don't seem to care about the Linux client at all.

Also both their gui and cli apps have dependencies on Gnome, and installing gnome fucked up my remote login setup. It's insane to me that even the cli relies on gnomes keychain

[-] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Proton vpn is pretty good, except on Linux where the client is horrendous. The Killswitch is very unreliable there. When it fails, it sends your machine right back to the internet instead of blocking the connection completely like it’s supposed to.

I have a paid proton email level, which gives me (I think?) one active VPN tunnel to use.

I tried it out and it works fine with the standard openvpn client on linux. I always set up my own killswitch, which is easy with ufw. You block all traffic except allow the VPN interface and IP. Bulletproof.

But what I really want is wireguard! I didn't know I wanted it, til I tried it. It's a lot nicer IMO than openvpn.

[-] dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 2 points 1 week ago

Hmm, maybe I can try the ufw approach then. Wish I knew about that before I installed gnome. Thanks for the tip.

[-] FineCoatMummy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

YW!

Here's what mine looks like, but I'm redacting the tunnel IPs and port numbers. You might have to add an allow for DNS in there depending on your VPN,

xx.xx.xx.xx xxxxx    ALLOW OUT   Anywhere   <-- the VPN endpoint IP and port
Anywhere             ALLOW OUT   Anywhere on XXXXXXX <-- the interface name
Anywhere             DENY OUT    Anywhere   <-- block all but the VPN tunnel
[-] floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago

I don't know much about these things, but if Proton uses standard protocols it ought to be possible to connect without using their own client.

[-] dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 2 points 2 weeks ago

It can be done with wireguard but that doesn't solve the killswitch issue. I'd have to write my own script or something.

[-] robotmonsterplanet@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

The speed was the main thing for me with Nord. Very slow a lot of the time. And I didn't like the weird/scammy feeling renewal prices. I found Mulvad much smoother in general. Nord might be better now, though. That was my experience from about 7 years ago

this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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