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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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[-] kingshrubb@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 month ago

What VPN do lemmy users recommend? Mullvad founder is funding right wing politics. Proton ceo is praising Trump. PIA has deep ties to Israeli intelligence.

[-] mytilus@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 month ago

Maybe AirVPN is an option? By their own words it was started by activists to imrpove anonymity and net neutrality. It is quite a bit less 'sleek' than proton or mullvad, but I have found it to work fine (you might have to try several servers before you find one that works for you if you want to get around geoblocking, as some of their IPs appear to have been blocked here and there).

Leaving this recommendation to see if someone replies with news on how they suck as well, because I have not really checked if there were any controversies surrounding them

[-] datavoid@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

I'm sure they suck too, but at least they allow heavy port forwarding?

[-] Trampampoline@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

Is Windscribe in bed with any lizard men?

[-] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

How do they suck? Sounds flimsy to be sure about something without providing evidence or really any arguments.

[-] datavoid@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago

I'm assuming they suck because they are a VPN company, see this thread for more info. I said that tongue in cheek though, I use air and I'm happy

[-] late_pessimistic@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 month ago

NYM seems promising, they are trying to build a decentralized VPN with multiple nodes, same as TOR but faster, so no one has full data who talks to who and what type of traffic.

However it's only been around for a year, so we still don't have enough data if their approach works or not compared to traditional VPNs.

iVPN is a good one, it has been around for 15 years now, and is also privacy and FOSS focused like Mullvad.

However they lack some security features that Mullvad has: DEITA, diskless servers etc.

Ultimately I would say go with:

  • NYM if you want to gamble (high risk high reward),

  • Mullvad for good security, but yeah your money goes to a far-right party in Sweden,

  • iVPN: worse security than Mullvad, but more trustworthy than NYM, and your money doesn't fund right-wing populism

[-] oceancloud@discuss.online 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I don't know about Proton. I don't judge people by what they say, but by what they do. Mullvad is putting its money where it's mouth is. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people who use Mullvad also use Brave.

[-] Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 month ago

The whole "Proton CEO loves Trump" is just another Reddit overreaction as far as I know.

He applauded Trump for an appointment he made to crack down on Big Tech. Yes, it's very doubtful any actual crackdown would ever happen, but I also don't see how it makes Yen a MAGA supporter.

[-] AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 month ago

He also kept digging when the backlash hit. It wasn't a great look, and the initial take was, at best, deeply naive.

That said, I'm actually considering switching to Proton over this. I think his statements are nowhere as bad as this Mullvad donation and I'm in the slow process of de-Googling and Proton's other offerings would be a huge step towards that. It probably isn't great to have email and calender and passwords and cloud storage and VPN all through one company, but it's better than two with one being Google.

[-] oceancloud@discuss.online 1 points 1 month ago

It just seems like Yen doesn't speak English that well, I could be wrong though

[-] mabeledo@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

I like Proton, but that seems to be controversial these days.

[-] buran@lemmy.today 2 points 1 month ago

Proton as a product is mostly fine in my opinion, I believe Andy's opinions and the response from the organization is what people don't like.

[-] Lanske@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Im still happy with my proton vpn. I mainly use the CLI on Linux and it works well and is fast. Might be an inpopular advice on Lemmy / Fediverse, but im still happy with Proton

this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
828 points (100.0% liked)

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