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.”
“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.”
The part being unsaid here is “that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is NOT INCOMPATIBLE WITH Mullvad’s values or mission” (pardon the double negative)
That’s what I have issue with. They’re saying Daniel’s own personal purpose/mission (the donation being an expression of that) is compatible with their mission, or at minimum does not conflict.
What does “freedom of speech” have to do with expression of Mullvad employees? Mullvad isn’t a government. Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. If Daniel’s own personal mission/purpose is incompatible with Mullvad’s, severing their relationship with him would be appropriate and not a violation of his freedom of speech. Of course, this goes back to, it’s not incompatible.
The “tolerance” bit, Daniel’s own personal mission/purpose as expressed by his donation is inherently inhumanely intolerant. Again, Mullvad is indirectly stating that intolerance is not incompatible with their mission/purpose, which makes the “tolerance” bit a contradiction. They might as well have people working for them that believe you have zero right to privacy.
fwiw - Windscribe (based in Canada) has been working well for me, and they are fully open source - https://windscribe.com/
Any recommendations that work well with Linux? I’m a beginner, and it was challenging enough to get Mullvad going on my immutable system. So any easy good transitions would be helpful.
Njala, Swedish, founded by the founder of the Pirate Bay, highly recommended
Airvpn is great
I have prepaid Mullvad so will use that until it expires. Then they never get my money again.
Rage bait title. Really feel like this is over reaching. If you stop using goods and services entirely funding things you disagree with the world would stop turning. I’m in full agreement of not funding bad things and companies who do bad stuff. Mull seems to be one of the only main fighting bastions left for good service and privacy. Not losing a customer here. Perhaps there is closed door reasons we don’t understand. Who knows. I paid for the service to function as intended, and it does.
If you stop using goods and services entirely funding things you disagree with the world would stop turning.
That’s a bit of a nihilistic philosophy don’t you think? “Everything is bad and terrible but I can’t be bothered to do anything about it so I’m just going to ignore it”. You know about the poem right? Your worldview is the entire point of the poem. It’s not good to have that worldview.
I think it was mis understood and possibly the language wasn’t well spoke. Vote with your wallet and your ballots. Vote everyone should vote as often as possible. There are so many companies conglomerates you say that are evil or atleast further evil like agendas. That voting with simply the wallet won’t work in practice everytime. I survive off of nestle feeding tube formula to live. I hate nestle as their a horrible company overall. But out of 12 formulas or more atleast I have tried this one is the only one that keeps me alive. The world is not black and white as a simple thought can be. Sometimes you must use something not so good to further good elsewhere as an offset.
Just to be clear, you’re saying you’re OK with potentially helping to establish a far right government in Sweden?
Sorry if I’m being blunt but this is essentially the case, no?
No. I am saying I’m paying for a service that hits above all other services in value and properties which I think are important for privacy, free speech, internet access, cost, and quality of service rendered. Mullvad offers and proves that their service functions as intended. They stay or try to stay ahead of the curve of laws, privacy eroding tactics, AI, etc. I do not support the private funding of negativity in any kind or oppression. But the service itself is better than many others I’ve tried. Court and agency tested no logs. Long standing track record of being truthful and reliable to their customers in regards to their needs. I still believe their service is quality outside of what a single person does involved in the business, like there aren’t many people surely working hard to make a good product at Mull. Their CEO or whoever donated. Is not the sole owner and operator. I paid for the service, and don’t plan on stopping. If things get worse or they start becoming full blown Nazis then things will change. For now I see benefit of the doubt.
He isn’t just the CEO. He’s the owner of the company. Your money is directly funding far right populism.
I’m seriously worried about what’s going on around this.
There is quite the push here for people to move to VPNs under the legals jurisdiction of surveillance heavy states, not just the US and UK but also places like Gibraltar and the British Virgin Islands which are British Overseas Territories with the same laws as Britain except were they passed specific local legislation that overrides British Law.
We’re talking about places with Information Courts which issue secret mass surveillance orders to companies based in or operating there and it doesn’t mater if that VPN is no logs because for all you know they’ve been forced to install realtime surveillance equipment/software and they can’t even tell you because BY THE LAW OF WERE THEY OPERATE if they did so they would end up in jail.
I would expect that the kind of people who would leave Mullvad because one of it’s owners is a far-right nutter are also the kind of people who don’t want everything they do and say tracked by the likes of the US or UK.
Further, the push is pervasive. For example https://vpn.techlore.tech/ is supposed to help you choose a good VPN, only if you look at those VPNs based in British Overseas Territories (Gibraltar, BVI) they’re listed as “Not 14-eyes” which that’s bullshit - I was actually curious and went and look at how Legislation works in Gibraltar and, as I wrote above, they have the same as in Britain except were they wrote their own legislation that overrides British legislation, which means that (unless somebody can point me out the legislation in Gibraltar that overrides it), the very same legislation that support the mass surveillance activities in Britain as a member of not only the “14-eyes” international surveillance agreements but the actual “5-eyes” one, applies to Gibraltar and hence to the likes of IVPN.
Frankly, looking for a replacement for Mullvad whilst having some awareness of the mass surveillance shit in supposedly democratic nations is scary as fuck, since most VPNs, for all their (possibly theatrical) “No logs” and whatnot, are actually in places with Information Courts which can issue secret court orders forcing them to install mass surveillance equipment.
Absolutely, if all you care about is avoiding lawyer letters because of pirating stuff, any “No Logs” VPN will probably do, but if you’re worried about the rise of the Far-Right then it makes sense that you’re not into there being a real risk that all you’re doing over your supposedly “No logs” VPN is in fact being logged directly into NSA or GCHQ systems (in the kind of country whose governments think being a leftwinger is “extremism” or even “terrorism”),
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.
I like Proton, but that seems to be controversial these days.
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.
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:
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NYM if you want to gamble (high risk high reward),
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Mullvad for good security, but yeah your money goes to a far-right party in Sweden,
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iVPN: worse security than Mullvad, but more trustworthy than NYM, and your money doesn’t fund right-wing populism
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Try tunnel bear perhaps?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
I’m sure they suck too, but at least they allow heavy port forwarding?
How do they suck? Sounds flimsy to be sure about something without providing evidence or really any arguments.
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
Is Windscribe in bed with any lizard men?
IVPN
IVPN is based in Gibraltar, which is a British Overseas Territory and whose laws are the same as Britain except were Gribraltar passed their own laws to override it.
Unless proven otherwise (by finding actual laws passed in Gibraltar to block it) treat any VPN based in Gibraltar as being subjected to the same kind of secret mass surveillance orders from Information Courts as those based in Britain.
Jurisdiction doesn’t matter, it’s an myth spread by Protonmail marketers so everyone thinks their privacy is ensured by some strict Swiss privacy laws.
Although privacy laws are pretty mild everywhere. Even GDPR is quite outdated and is barely enforced.
Proton, Tuta and others do it because “Swiss privacy” or “EU-based” brand is much more recognizable and easier to sell people on, compared to “we do metadata obfuscation” or “here is our 50 page long security audit”.
However, what actually matters more is security architecture. Signal is US based, but they thought through how to retain as little data on users as possible, so when FBI asked them for info, Signal could only give them date of account registration, user ID, and last login.
TLDR ignore country of registration and HQ location, evaluate on the merits
You clearly have never owned a business if you think the very legal system which makes that company a legal entity with all the rights it entails (i.e. they’re registered there) can’t force them to do whatever the local laws say they have to do.
They can literally strike that company down of the Company Register and seize its assets because a company did not obey a lawful court order there (such as one from an Information Court).
The rest of your post is even more ignorant bollocks. This is not Privacy Legislation, this is Surveillance Legislation: the stuff that enables and backs the giant civil society surveillance systems revealed by Snowden, not the stuff that makes it a bit harder for Google to know what kinds of Porn you watch.
Just great, there are barely any good alternatives to mullvad
That’s exactly what concerns me.
I would love to find a No Logs VPN with anonymous payments outside the legal jurisdiction of at least the US, UK and EU.
I mean, even the fucking Nederland which used to be pretty pro-personal rights is now a member of the 14-eyes.
Örebro party advocates for “remigration” which is an alt right term for mass deportation or ethnic cleansing. The article is a bit obtuse on this. Basically this means crimes against humanity because it would mean detention centers or concentration camps and insane cruelty. Unfortunately this needs to become the end of Mullvad.
None of this is really surprising though, backlash is to be expected. Most people in most countries are against mass immigration, which does not make one a fascist. Sweden is now 8.1% Muslim which is a lot to ask of people. Since 1990 it rose from <1% and still seems to be rising. Most are not actually practicing Islam though, only like 25% or so according to the numbers on wikipedia. Which also has been my anecdotal experience in my country.
The issue is that the large parties do not budge on the neoliberal idea of immigration, to fuel economic growth and depressing wages. So only extremists or fringe parties remain to be voted on. Some people simply feel very strongly about “this is our land”. And in most countries this is completely different than the mostly empty / very low population density USA which is traditionally an immigration country. It is not just a question of ideology. People have a right to feel less than holy thoughts about preserving their homeland. My point is that ignoring these feelings is irresponsible politics. Especially in times of looming economic decline and coming mass refugees from climate change.
Of course, Örebro is not acceptable because it advocates fascist policies and should be outlawed and all supporters shunned.
It seems like mullvad always did the right thing, and stood for privacy. Very strange move by them
The move wasn’t done by Mullvad, but by the guy personally.
The Proton CEO or found is I think also a libertarian or something. Libertarians are stupid, but they do actually believe in something.
I agree that the feeling should be addressed but I don’t think immigration should be treated at all like the watering down of the political identity. Immigrants come to other countries, in part, to seek a better life. They become just as nationalist as anyone if given a country who cares for them and is worthy of being prideful about.
In Germany, the CDU and Merz work to strip Germans of their culture when they attack public healthcare or enforce working on Sundays. They would and will reduce vacation time, make trains worse, and deregulate the things that make Germany Germany the longer they’re in power. Culture is something that is generated when the common person is wealthy and influential to their community, not just the millionaires. Especially not the millionaires like Merz who are selling our home and our quality of life nickle by nickel.
I agree on the point of not ignoring these feelings. It’s a tough question, how to change the culture to be more welcoming to immigration in the time of looming climate refugee crises. Just wanted to point out that Sweden has a lower population density (26 ppl/km2) than the US (38 ppl/km2). Density is probably not the issue, although how all that land is put to use might be one of them.
how to change the culture to be more welcoming to immigration in the time of looming climate refugee crises
There are some estimates for 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050 globally. No idea how accurate that is. But I do not believe there is any possibility of people somehow being convinced of accepting anything close to that. Even if wealth inequality and looming economic hardship wouldn’t undermine that goal.
PS: And yeah good point about population density in Sweden. I’m not sure how much habitable land there actually is though. I don’t think it really matters though.
I think you articulated greatly something that’s been around my mind for a while.
I’ve been a while thinking how migration policies should be revised in the EU, attending to human rights and seeking the best for everyone. Personally I think the route to take is improve the countries of origin, do whatever we can so people doesn’t even feel the need to leave all their friends and family behind for economic reasons.
But as the EU is not addressing this because corporations profit from mass inmigration, the alt-right way of thinking about inmigration (which is basically genocide) is rising.
We could work on improving technology for building high density housing, producing food and clean water with little space and energy and then exporting that into desperate areas. We could massively uplift the quality of life all around the globe while spending much elss energy and resources. With automation and AI this could be even easier. But practically this won’t happen. We can’t even stop the US imperialist wars and conflicts that are producing so many refugees.
Considering the far-right push to obliterate privacy, current and historically, it’s a really poor look for a company with a privacy product.
It’s rumoured that Australia will look to banning VPNs next for “protecting the children” after recently mandating proof of age laws to a bunch of services like social media and pornography.
Lets not deflect the blame away from the political forces which have been subverting Democracy for decades.
Go look at the Chat Control vote in the EU Parliament: it wasn’t the Far-Right that voted for that shit (well, at least not in my country), it was the big “moderate” “center” parties that voted for it whilst the rest voted against it.
The push for authoritarianism is coming from the well-entrenched, big, mainstream, neoliberal parties, the very people who believed the Power of Money should not have to obey the Power of the Democratically Elected State (using slogans like “Do not interfere in the Free Market” to justify having Money as as the top Power).
(Notice how in the US the Democrats are and have been for decades just as much into widespread civil society surveillance and zero privacy as the Republicans)
Mainstream, Neoliberal parties are the people who have shifted Democracy in most of the West towards Oligarchy, with billionaires and even trillionaires holding immense real power.
In most of the West the return of Fascists to politics is still pretty recent and as they’re not the ones entrenched in power, it’s not actually in their interests for widespread civil society surveillance to be in place since such mechanisms are meant to detect and stop challenges to those in power, not to put fringe movements in power.
Since there are always people who, purposely or not, misrepresent what’s going on here and I’ve hashed it out in other threads I’ll paste it here as well as some links to share alternatives. Like, how do I see upvotes on a comment saying it’s a marxist far left party? The National Socialists also promised homes and dental and everything good for the Aryan race once they ethnically cleansed the rest. They certainly weren’t any kind of left wing.
Sorry for the wall of text, copying and pasting from some of my other comments, I’ll bold the main points to create the throughline:
What, by definition, constitutes fascism?
often Fascism : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition
At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation. —Jason Stanley
Just to make sure we’re not looking at a singular definition, let’s look at Wikipedia too
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[3][4] Opposed to communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism,[5][6] fascism is at the far-right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[1][6][7]
And now, let’s look at what the Örebro party’s own stated platform, which received 72% of its funding from the Mullvad founder, which also amounted to 27 times their total funding in 2024, and has directly led to them stating that with this funding they can field candidates whereby they couldn’t previously:
Some of its key issues include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, ending taxes on energy and fuel, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art, large-scale remigration, expanded social housing, a stricter assimilation policy, and free dental care.[3][4]
https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut
Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden. “I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.
One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.
In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.
He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said
And what’s remigration?
Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.[2][3]
So fascism is about racial and national purity and hierarchy, as we defined, and the Orebro party supports remigration, which is a concept of forcing immigrants out of countries to preserve the purity of “culture” and the race of the nation.
“Sweden is for the Swedes”
“Israel is for Israelis”
“America is for Americans”
“Germany is for the Germans”
For those looking for other vpn options:
https://vpn.techlore.tech/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ijfqfLrJWLUVBfJZ_YalVpstWsjw-JGzkvMd6u2jqEk/htmlview#gid=231869418
IDK how they try to reach to electors, but “seconds generation immigrants” is absolutely far-right bs.
Fascism requires support for an authoritarian dictatorship, among other stances. It is not purely “about racial and national purity and hierarchy”. That’s ethno-nationalism. Yes, fascists are ethno-nationalists, but not every ethno-nationalist is a fascist.
Definitions of fascism has always been problematic because it is a chimera. Personally I really like this one: Fascism is the moral belief in inequality based on identity, like e.g. ethnicity or gender. It is a bit more wide ranging definition, but pretty simple and clear. For example a democracy where women are not allowed to vote and are exploited as cheap labor at home would be fascist.
Contrast that with neoliberalism, which is the moral belief in inequality based on class / wealth. Which explains why they ally so easily.
You can’t just pick and choose definitions of a word. When you use a word, the most common definition of it is how you will be understood (depending on context). Otherwise I could say that poop is worth a lot and then say that poop means gold.
Moreover, sadly, many people do not even have the slightest idea of what certain ideologies are called. They don’t get further than “fascism bad nazi bad communism bad” without being able to make a distinction. This allows for easy manipulation of the masses by defaming anything you don’t like as one of these things. That’s all it is.
If you use a word that you don’t entirely understand, research the word, and if necessary, explain how you understand the word. Allows for good-fath discussions. Do not misrepresent it.
Check out the book I linked. The definition of fascism is an academic question.
And how do you enforce ethnic cleansing? Cause I hate to tell you, but it’s not democratically. Authoritarians simply use democratic methods to shroud legitimacy while ballot spoiling, gerrymandering, or any number of countless methods to undermine said democracy.
If you can’t understand that tearing up citizenship, thereby removing the ability for constituents to vote, is inherently authoritarian, I can’t help you.
In a democracy you just require a (super)majority for everything necessary to be changed and done to achieve anything.
It is of course easier in a dictatorship to achieve ethnic cleansing, but doesn’t require one. Look at Turkey and how they treat the Kurds. Not saying they are the best example of a democracy, but it isn’t a dictatorship by definition.
Turkey is actually a great example for my point, not yours. Erdogan has used nominally democratic supermajority mechanisms to strip Kurdish politicians of immunity, remove elected Kurdish mayors, imprison journalists covering Kurdish issues, and consolidate executive power to the point where the democratic form is a shell. If that’s your model of ethnic cleansing without dictatorship, it’s nothing but democracy in name.
The supermajority argument also has a structural flaw. It assumes the minority being cleansed retains voting power throughout the process. But the entire mechanism of the policy is to remove them before they can vote against it. Strip citizenship, remove from voter rolls, criminalize political organizing. A supermajority that votes to disenfranchise a minority and then prevents them voting on the disenfranchisement isn’t a functioning democracy but is already on the fall to authoritarianism.
And you don’t even need a majority to capture the apparatus. The Nazis never won a majority. Neither did Trump in 2016 or 2024 measured against eligible voters. Around 30% of actual eligible voters in both cases was sufficient to claim power through a combination of voter suppression, institutional manipulation, minority rule mechanisms like the electoral college, and strategic exploitation of democratic procedural norms that weren’t designed to survive bad faith actors. The democratic form provided legitimacy cover while it was dismantled from within.
Ethnic cleansing doesn’t require a dictatorship as a precondition. Nor do the destruction of institutions, nor does the use of religious idolatry to provide a pretense of legitimacy for war, death, and destruction. They produce one as an outcome. Fascism is an ideological process, not a checklist.
I can see where you’re coming from, as I mentioned, Turkey isn’t the best example of a democracy, but even now Erdogan can still get removed by a majority of the population, which is not the case in a dictatorship. A dictator can only be removed by the military.
I disagree with the last sentence, the definition of fascism is pretty clear, it is an ideology with certain beliefs and opinions. Not a process, not a form of government, but a set of ideas. If the set of ideas is not complete, it is not that ideology. I already gave you the name of the ideology you were describing.
It is like describing something socialist as stalinist. Like yeah, stalinists are socialists but not every socialist is a stalinist.
You don’t need a simple majority when you can have a few judges rewrite the interpretation of the existing laws
It should be obvious that [founder’s] private donation to a political party is not part of [his company’s] values or mission
Riiiiiiiiiight, because it always shakes out like that
There’s no equally good VPN company, by a wide margin.
This guy’s a rich “libertarian anarchist” who donated to the new party of a marxist he followed because he wants lower taxes and less immigration.
I don’t really even know what to make of that. Unlike the Proton guy who slobbered on the demented rapist’s bunghole, which I knew exactly what to make of it.
You will excuse Mullvad but demonize Proton… This shit cannot be made up.
Olympic level mental gymnastics…
Please explain. I don’t have much background on either. Are they different? The same? How?
He’s a fascist painted with a faded red star, but even the Nazi flag used a bit of red. For the well informed, it’s actually a classic.
I have already quit my subscription. Haven’t taken the time to find an alternative yet. I’m stocked up on media for the time being.
Do they offer subscriptions now? I thought they are only pre-paid
I am currently testing out AirVPN. Seems pretty good so far.
I made the switch to IPVN and it’s felt exactly the same. Maybe even better. Same price. Servers in multiple locations. Allows routing through 2 VPN servers. No logs. No money going to racist ideology.
Mullvad can claim whatever they like about their values, but they are a for-profit company. The profits of the company are being used to fund racial segregation. If they believe in their values they’ll switch to a non-profit foundation. Until that time they can get fucked!
Is IPVN owned by a non-profit foundation?
Nope they’re owned by a single person. I hope he’ll be more responsible. If you know of any non-profit vpn providers let me know! Happy to switch again
I had hoped you had any examples since you pointed out that it’s a for-profit company :/ Can’t do IPVN either than since who knows what the owner uses their money for.
All I know is the profits of Mullvad go to bad causes. Yes IVPN aren’t perfect but the services are so similar the choice should be obvious. Until a better alternative comes along i’m going to use the one that does less harm.
I’m curious if they offer port forwarding? That feature has been keeping me on PIA despite ethical concerns
AirVPN does port forwarding, and they’re less dodgy than PIA. Proton also does but there’s some questions raised by the CEOs support of Trump (still less dodgy than PIA though)
The CEO didn’t support Trump: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
The CEO made an official statement and then the official Proton account doubled down. Praising Donald Trump and JD Vance and insisting, at the time, that the Republican party would be the better party unless Democrats did something about it.
I’m familiar with this link though. It’s the most suspicious, anonymous, intentionally incomplete, poorly written, AstroTurf-looking thing I’ve ever seen before. (How AstroTurfy? Proton officially uses it as a reference. So it gets extra scrutiny.)
I suppose we read different things, because what they said is that republicans aren’t “friendly with big tech” and that’s a good thing. There are other blog posts where they explain their position in detail, like https://proton.me/blog/trump-control-nsa-privacy
I’m familiar with this link though.
Yours doesn’t load for me.
You may be familiar, but you refuse to argue on its merits and sources, of which there are plenty.
And by the way, if we were to talk astroturfing, there are a handful of accounts in this community that consistently post negative comments about Proton. I’m not saying this is an orchestrated attack against them, but it’s really damn suspicious that in every topic tangential to privacy or VPNs, there’s always someone mentioning how awful Proton is.
Hard to critique me if you can’t open the links to see what the official accounts say, and your anomymous Proton-backed blog post doesn’t mention it either. Here’s a relevant snippet they disappeared.
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
- Proton_Team on Reddit, January 2025
Your link is to a 2016 blog post that says, in large font,
It is not Trump’s fault
So forgive me if I don’t think this is exonerating evidence, but rather something that resembles Proton moving from a more modest both-sides stance to attempting a very partisan one.
The “it doesn’t matter” part of the blog post is also dangerously inaccurate, implying any privacy violation in Switzerland is illegal while, in reality, Swiss authorities have gotten Proton to disclose user data several times in high-profile incidents. Here’s the biggest one in my mind. And another and another.
At the time it was true, corporate dems were way more likely to be in bed with big tech. That’s just a fact.
The “it doesn’t matter” part of the blog post is also dangerously inaccurate, implying any privacy violation in Switzerland is illegal while, in reality, Swiss authorities have gotten Proton to disclose user data several times in high-profile incidents. Here’s the biggest one in my mind. And another and another.
Ah, I remember you now. You’re the guy who thinks that privacy equals absolute immunity from court orders! That’s never the case and will never be.
Damn that’s the only thing they don’t offer compared to the others 💔
