Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
you don’t need a VPN company to use a VPN. and using the “no ethical consumption” line is pretty fucking gross when you’re talking about buying shit from nazis.
known datacenter IPs are increasingly blocked by website operators thanks to scraping
A vpn doesn’t need to be an internet proxy either, but users of vpn companies are paying them to privately and securely anonymize people’s traffic and shield their requests from the isp.
It is of course possible to do this using a vps over connections as well documented and simple as ssh but there are many ways to screw that up and paying a company to work out the details is extremely tempting.
If a person ends up using multiple endpoints, the cost of several vps subscriptions would also eclipse the cost of a vpn service.
I don’t need to pay someone to dig a hole for my pilings either but the quality and speed of their entrenching is beyond what I can create.
ok, but if there is two companies, one that donates to fascists and one that does not, are you gonna tell me you’ll just shrug your shoulders and go with the nazis because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism anyway? like, my dude, what the fuck?
That is exactly what he has been saying all along. Most of us know that a commercial VPN is not a silver bullet for privacy, much less for security. Lemmy is full of geeks that know how to deploy their own VPN infrastructure. Good. However, in the commercial VPN space, Mullvad has no competition in terms of keeping the user as private as a commercial VPN will allow. You mention going with a service not run by Nazi CEOs and whatnot, and I’m sure most, if not all, of us agree. Now, if you have information on such a service, that may be even comparable to Mullvad’s offering, I’m sure many of us would like to know about it.
Edit:
I don’t use Mullvad VPN, nor have I ever, yet, but my argument is the same. I just find it a bit more expensive than what I’m willing to pay for that service, which doesn’t mean I think it is too expensive for everyone.
Well out the gate: there isn’t a vpn provider like mullvad elsewhere. I have active subscriptions to several at the moment for different uses and have used at least two dozen different ones over the years as well as maintaining my own tunnels and overlay networks. There are probably lots of people that know more than me but I think they’d agree that mullvad occupies a specific niche that pretty much no one else is in right now.
What politics would a master need to have for you to submit to their will?
What level of need does a person have to be in for it to be acceptable that they buy bread from a Nazi owned store?
You have tried over 24 different VPNs?
There’s a lot out there. Someone made a big chart to show the corporate relationships between them.
E: found it https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260103-vpn-industry-relationship-map#gsc.tab=0
oh I see. you’re not a serious person. there are quite a few vpn providers that are better than mullvad. starting with any that allow port forwarding. mullvad does absolutely nothing that a dozen other vpn providers don’t also do. and if you actually had all this experience you appealed to, then you would know that.
you’re justifying renting a vpn from a nazi by comparing it to buying bread so you don’t starve to death. likely, in your head, this seemed like a good argument. idk, maybe you are some kind of digital being, made of energy, who must consume data to survive. I apologize if this is the case, I must seem speciest for thinking your argument was fucking idiotic.
just fucking admit you don’t see anything wrong with doing business with nazis, you weirdo.
Mullvad allowed port forwarding for many years until it was put into a position because of collusion between Interpol and the big cdns where it had to choose between cooperating with an investigation or retaining that feature.
The choice to drop an incredibly popular offering in order to avoid having to cooperate with the police is a testament to the trust component of the service.
When I said that no one is in that niche at the moment, part of that assessment rests on those events.
But also there are vanishingly few independent privacy focused VPN services that accept cash payment, don’t have accounts (and therefore don’t have the need for records that can be subpoenaed), don’t keep logs, are well respected and trusted, have open source clients, support shadowsocks and WireGuard, run an ad blocking dns and have had to resist the police in multiple high profile events.
I’m open to learn of them.
I assume because you made an equivalence between using an internet service and food you would be willing to buy bread from a Nazi? Again, what masters ideology in the necessarily hierarchical market would you accept?
what are you talking about? you made that equivalence. I said it was a stupid fucking equivalence.
So, a third time: under what circumstances and level of need would you accept a person paying a Nazi for goods or services?
at no point and under no circumstances. the very idea is preposterous. why would you need to pay a nazi? kill them and take the goods you need. what a ridiculous question.
you’re not clever, so stop trying to be.