cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8915892
(original article in Swedish that reported this)
Posting this because I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.
The party claims to stand for a “class-conscious populism” which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the “productive” classes of society against the “Transferiat”, with the “Transferiat” being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work “made-up services”[…]
The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that “live off transfers”, as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.
Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)
Even if you’re comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.
I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it’s not great
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The company Mullvad do not support nor like Daniel Berntsson’s donation which is a personal donation from Daniel himself.
Mullvad as a company do not support far-right.
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
So long as Daniel is paid from Mullvad, Mullvad financially supports the far right by proxy.
That is true, but since the other employeers at Mullvad don’t like Daniel’s donation, they don’t take his side. Of course it’s very shameful that he did that donation, and I truly hope he gets fired.
But one thing must be clear: facts should be just that: facts! Daniel took his own money and personally donated it to that shitty party - not Mullvad!
With this the only European browser is Vivaldi, by its own structure as a cooperative, owned by the employees, quite far from the right. The only thing they sponsor is a local football club in Iceland.
I hope that KDE would improve one day its independent Konqueror browser (KHTML/ Qt engine, ancestor of WebKit and Blink, Linux only), to have some more alternatives in the EU. It works as browser AND file manager, but due to a good improvement very slow nowadays.
Mullvad browser is still mostly maintained by the Tor project and doesn’t phone home, still one of the best choices for a no fingerprint browser even if you use a different vpn for it. Biggest downside imo is it’s not on Android. It’s entirely FOSS and again, no phoning home on an action, so it doesn’t matter what the creator thinks.
My personal use case for tracking is different from others, I mostly want to avoid surveillance capitalism. It’s genuinely a problem for my PTSD, if I talk about my PTSD on a corporate app I’ll get spammed with triggering shit 24/7 because they like to spam you with “solutions” and self help and news for crimes against women like it’s my special interest. Obviously I would love to avoid state surveillance but you’re not getting that from any vpn server domiciled in the west, it’d have to be in a geopolitical enemy of the west e.g. Russia or China or Serbia and most people would not like the latency that involves.
If you cut out buffer bloat it’s easy to forget that everything is only slightly slower, it’s the inconsistency in the latency that makes you really notice. With a base of ~130ms when it doubles for those first couple of packets of every page load you really feel it, as long as it’s smooth, your brain can adjust.
I have it for my whole house and no one notices/complains.
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat https://github.com/lynxthecat/CAKE-autorate
That said, it’s kind of niche then more niche to run it on the VPN too, I wish it were more accessible.
FOSS nowadays is less and less a guarantee, since Google, M$, Amazon and Fakebook are one of the biggest contributers of FOSS (naturally all with their corresponding tracking APIs). Currently the company ethics, transparency and trust are a very important. At least for me, it’s not acceptable when a service is used to sponsor right wing or nazi parties. It’s not direct Mullvad, but their CEO paid by this product. Faschism is advancing in a creepy manner and at least I’m not willing to support it in any way.
PD. TOR was developed by the US army and secret services and they still owned the onion server. The future and free internet will not be the Onion, but I2P and decentralized networks, out of the reach from big brother corps.
It’s pretty easy in my opinion. We see, that right wing shit spreads around the world.
My consequences will be: Any company supporting this shit (even indirectly) will not be paid with my money in the future.
Too bad my subscription for a year has been paid a few weeks ago…
They’ve offered refunds for those who are upset about the owner’s actions. Not condoning anything, but maybe worth getting your money back.
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Yeah, I will take a look into that. Thanks!
chill. I’m definitely taking your word for it /s. If everything I don’t agree with is fascism, well that makes it easy huh?
Yeah, we get it, you love Nazis.
Even bigger yikes.
Title is incorrect, it’s not Mullvad donating the money but one of the owners.
This post is blatant disinformation.
They even released a statement regarding this.
I wonder if people will do this for my business. “It’s not the business! It’s the owner!” (The owner is the business…) I could get away with a ton of shit.
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Where does he get the money he donates?
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This is true, but it a co-founder with 50% ownership. Musk has like a 15% ownership in Tesla, yet they are the modern day Nazi car. Surely if half the ownership of a company supports fascists that kind of makes it a racist company.
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I’m very confused by what you mean with this. It’s like saying human basic needs doesn’t aligns with left-right spectrum, like no shit!
Far right needs to track their targets. The nazi had IBM census machines to better identify jews, and right now, Palantir fucking exists, and its founder is well aligned on left-right.
I can’t keep track of all the assholes. Going to need an asshole tracker soon.
That would be a fun website. Asshole tracker for Companies & Politicians and others?
Could do an Assholes Wiki and make it community contributions lol
Mullvad
Reverse credit card charge
Yeah… About that…
You mailed in cash didn’t you
Kinda their best feature
In the past they let you keep CC on file for monthly payments but now they’re prepay only and they delete CC info after 40 days. I think I prepaid for like a year and half before I knew any of this. Mullvad’s obsession with user privacy is completely unparalleled in 2026.
Monero
Consumers are nothing but fish in a barrel these days
Be CEO of privacy company
Donate $500k to a right wing party publicly
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800
Hi,
Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I’ve seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns you’re welcome to comment on this thread, or email our customer support.
See below for the response you’ll get from support:
Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.
Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don’t agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don’t agree with.
We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.
This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.
The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.
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.
That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it’s important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.
scummy af with this deflection. as if anyone would want the money they paid for a service funneled to bad actors regardless of who is doing it…
Well, it’s not like the other founder approved his political donations. I think it’s a fair enough point to make, it is a private donation, and not a company donation.
In a privately owned company, the wishes of the owners are the wishes of the company. Especially with political actions, treating them as completely separate is just putting blinders on.
Sure, but there are two owners. It’s possible to start a company with someone that has different views, or ones that diverge over time. You can’t really blame the other guy for his partner’s opinions.
So what should they do? Liquidate the company? Should the reasonable person leave the company he built? The guy the internet doesn’t like might still be ok to work with, and equally not want to leave. Should you get in trouble for your coworker’s opinions?
Yes
a private donation with our money.
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“shitty to hold Mullvad accountable for this “ No. It’s not. Hold them accountable. Co-founder must have known that Berntsson has fascist tendencies. That’s kinda hard to hide
By all accounts, he seems to have been a fairly standard TESCREAL-adjacent high-decoupling libertarian until now, like a lot of tech founders. While some of these end up steelmanning fascism and coming to the conclusion that it’s pretty neat, it by no means follows.
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Fuck off idiot.
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if the company put out a fencesitting statement instead of bringing him consequences, at best they don’t care
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regardless, paying for a service that pays for fascism is something that might put them in trouble if they don’t deal with it.
that is if people care. that has to be a consideration these days.
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if this amounts to something remains to be seen
Don’t tolerate the intolerant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Berntsson hides his fascist tendencies behind a thin veneer of free speech.
Strömberg obviously knows his bedmate and tolerates his tendencies.
Fuck them both. Delete Mullvad (which I used until very recently)
Don’t rely on a totschlagargument to to save yourself from thinking about the complex consequences of your choices.
Even if you think Popper was right that doesn’t mean you can just draw a line down the middle of humanity dividing the intolerant-because-evil and intolerant-but-only-to-other-group.
Idc
Once again, it feels like too much money and power just makes people into freaks. None are completely immune, too few are effectively resistant.
When money makes you complicit in the system where money is power, there is no way to leverage money to fix the system unless you’re somehow completely insulated from direct personal gain.
Morality, ethics, humanity… These must be maintained, have we all just moved on? Maybe it’s just me that’s given up.
I believe that a person’s world view, ethics, moral system, etc is almost entirely molded to fit their incentives. When I was a manufacturing engineer, I was effectively automating people’s jobs. I created an elaborate narrative that not only let me off the hook, but made me the good guy. I was making the workers more productive and therefore setting the stage for them to negotiate better pay or treatment. That plant closed down 3 years later.
If everyone who punched a child in the face received $1000, people would initially be appalled by anybody who would take that money. After a while, people would start to fondly remember moments when they had been beaten or hurt. They would consider it a vital part of growing up. “Pain is what makes us strong”. People would proudly announce how many children they had punched. It would completely change the morals of everyone with the opportunity to receive the benefit.
Many people have personal evidence of this. A work friend suddenly becomes a prick when they get promoted to supervisor. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. In this case, A CEO feels his power in society threatened and he adopts whatever politics is needed to ensure he retains power. He isn’t doing this out of cold calculus. He will actually believe the politics because that’s what fits his incentives and makes him the good guy, actually.
I use sometimes only an Proxy to skip country restrictions, I don’t use a VPN. If I need an VPN, I would probably use the SPN from the Portmaster which I use anyway.
