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 [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.
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.
So if I use Mullvad, some of that is funding far-right politics?
At this point it’s safer to just assume every purchase you make is funding far right politics.
Not as much as the food you eat or the utilities you use, but yes.
Yes, although frankly it’s really fucking hard to name anything that isn’t these days. Like, you probably can’t even go grocery shopping without some of that money finding us way to alt right politics.
Yes
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Cool, which ones?
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US
big left wing politiciansAnd who might that be?
They are a troll or a fascist, so any response is going to involve mental illness.
Damn, I was hoping to find a VPN donating to left wing politicians cause that would be dope.
- a troll
- a fascist
- involve mental illness
Porque no los tres?
Well it doesn’t start with FTX because they didn’t offer a VPN service. Can you name just one then please?
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Yeah it’s weird how these generalizations fall apart when you try to find a single example of a far-left VPN provider but all you can come up with is a years-defunct criminal crypto hedge fund whose “far-left funding” was donating to a middle-right democrat’s election fund.
what an incredibly low effort troll. Mamdani might be the only center-left politician in the US. There are no far-left politicians in the US empire.
You named a cryptocurrency company, not a VPN company.
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I’ve heard that one as well from graphene devs on mastodon and I agree that this is not you typical right wing populist. Don’t know if calling him left wing is any more appropriate though
This is a frustrating pposition to be in, particularly when few people are willing to offer viable alternatives in such threads.
I don’t want to let a purity test be the reason I impulse switch to a less effective VPN, but don’t want to indirectly fund things I don’t support. Yes, money I spend on Mullvad might go towards shit I don’t want, but what else is on par with Mullvad that doesn’t have some other downside?
but don’t want to indirectly fund things I don’t support.
The only safe way to do that is to not spend at all. Unless you find a co-op, your money is going to some owner(s) who will use the money as they please. Commercial VPNs are mostly privacy snake oil and ways to get access to media, so abstaining for a while isn’t unreasonable.
Afaik IVPN is really the only alternative. I’ll be switching to them soon when my account expires.
Appears to be the case.
It seems so, and also who knows what else, maybe even the far left
No, no, its just the ceo’s personal politics that he donates lots of money get fwrs from his job to.
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.
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)
Damn that’s the only thing they don’t offer compared to the others 💔
“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.”
I’m not sure what they mean by this. Plenty of corporations do make animal rights, taxes, public healthcare, etc. an important part of their values and mission. Why would it be obvious that they’re not?
Besides, we do want Nazis and fascists to be pariahs. Putting pressure on Mullvad not to associate is a good thing.
Specially in Nordics. Social corporate responsibility is a very long tradition in Nordics, specially with due to stuff like co-operative customer, producer or worker owned companies, state enterprises and so on.
Including leadership teams behavior. Companies do get flack for what kind of persons they hire as leadership, since it is (pretty reasonably) assumed their mindset and worldview affects their conduct while leading the company.
Plus not only is he leader, he is owner so again money to company’s pocket is in the end money to his pocket.
One can’t claim “we are responsible company, while having opposite kind of CEO/leader”. It is his private matter he has these opinions, what isn’t private is him being company leader. Company doesn’t want his private opinions affecting the company, get rid of him as leader.
It would be one thing, if he was “lineworker” employee. Then person can have private opinions don’t affect company. However he isn’t mere salary employee in the depths of server hall lifting and plugging in servers to racks and cleaning cooling equipment clean. He is company leadership.
I agree (though I still think it is a good thing to fire fascists, even when they are lowly employees lol)
Literally applying skin stuff from a brand that makes a big deal about being vegan as I read this.
The guy made a donation with his own money. His donation is no more Mullvads than a donation you make privately is representative of the company you work for.
The guy made a donation with his own money
Uhh where do you think that money comes from?
If you’ve bought Mullvad’s services you have unwittingly contributed to that donation.
Every nazis salary comes from somewhere, or do you boycott just about everything?
do you boycott just about everything?
It’s just not buying stuff. You make it sound impossible.
No I mean, every nazis or racist gets their money from somewhere, be it Mullvad or Nestlé or Walmart, how do you avoid supporting that? Do you just don’t buy stuff from anywhere or do you have an ever shrinking base of viable options?
Yes I fully understand how he gets money from being part owner of the company, I never said that wasn’t the casr. But how he chooses to spend his private cash is not the fault of Mullvad the company.
I completely get wanting to boycott the company to avoid giving him money. But it makes no sense to blame the company for his private spending.
I don’t care who’s fault it is, I’d still rather use a VPN that didn’t have any controversy.
It’s absolutely people’s business whether they support the public face of a public company giving money to a public political party
Like, what part of Mullvad not being responsible for the donation in any way is it that people are not understanding? The company had no control or say over this dudes donation, so they can’t be responsible for it. Sure, don’t buy mullvad so you avoid indirectly giving the nutjob more money to support his fascist political views, that’s a totally valid response. But It doesn’t change that Mullvad is not, and never can be, responsible for his donation.
Not sure how involved he is but I guess as a co-founder he is bound to be getting some of the Mullvad money
Yes of course he is. but once it leaves the company to pay him his share, Mullvad is not able to control of what that money is spent on whatsoever. Since he made a private decision outside the control or influence of the company, how couod Mullvad be accountable for it?
We get that the people who work for a jerk, are not responsible for the bad decisions of that jerk, and it’s a shame that they will suffer for his bad decisions, but that’s part of the risks you take as an employee, and there are a great many risks you take working for anyone, most of which the owner class refuse to acknowledge. We all recognize that it’s a struggle to find new employment, but they always have the option of finding a new company to work for.
The owner is the primary beneficiary of any capital investment. Collateral damage for their decisions is their responsibility, not the consumer.
I agree… although I also understand people who feel the other way. As a top guy in the company the money he gets is going to be usually much more than an employee and for just existing at the top. So it feels more like company money than someone getting paid for actually putting in the grunt work to keep the company running. Not to mention that nobody is talking about mullvad and the ideology of random coder #26, the actions of the cofounder is always going to be in the same sentence as mullvad. So I understand taking a stance to not feed into that.
However I don’t agree with the moral superiority stance that often (not always) comes with that viewpoint. By all means boycott them yourself but I’m not one to push that on others unless it is actually the company itself donating or if their views start poisoning the quality of the service they provide (brave for example)
If they are rich they are almost always a right wing asshole. Why would anyone be surprised by this?
Per his blog he’s a “libertarian anarchist”.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
->libertarian.
I always read that as ‘far right, but kinda ashamed, or can’t get laid by claiming it so….’
Totes.
Wealth needs limits
I always say there should be a hard cutoff at a million a year and you should be taxed 100% at anything over that.
I think it would be more effective to have a hard wealth (both liquid and non-liquid assets) cutoff of somewhere between $10-50 million rather than a cap on an annual income.
Even from a capitalist perspective this makes sense. Money pooling at the top is money not moving through the economy; 100% taxes encourage reinvestment and philanthropy to avoid the tax.
Wealth need not exist at all.
The point of wealth is heyying around limits. You cannot continue to have fungible personal wealth without corruption. It doesn’t even work on a hypothetical philosophical level.
Yeah, literally 99.999% of products you buy in 2026 fund right wing fascism, and most of it you can’t escape because they own the entire supply chain.
Ain’t capitalism fun?
Switched to IVPN, but might make another switch to NymVPN: https://f-droid.org/packages/net.nymtech.nymvpn
Could you explain why? I’ve been looking at switching to iVPN but I haven’t discovered enough to make me feel comfortable.
iVPN has veen great so far (aside from not being able to use it on my TV due to the lack of a TV layout), but NymVPN provides even more protections and anonymity based on The Hated One’s research:
I wanted nym to be good but I had constant connection problems on android. Cachyos it was more stable.
Good to know. Thanks!
I can vouch for IVPN. Made the switch when I heard the news and its been pretty seamless. Generated an account number and funded it with monero. There’s an fdroid app too! Service has been really good so far
The vouch needed isn’t that it works. It’s how they handle your data.
I found OVPN to be basically the same thing. They’ve actually proven in court that they have no way of logging customer activity.
The Örebro Party leader is a communist. So not quite far right. And they don’t even have a party program right now. They are still working on it for the 2026 election.
that’s what i thought, then i read what they actually want from an interview allard did in 2022. he’s basically invented a new class he calls the “transferiat”, which he claims is the main leech on society. the members of this class? public servants, journalists, and people on social security (allard even specifies “immigrants” there). he wants to get rid of this class, in order to achieve smaller government, “higher quality” reporting, and fewer welfare queens.
that’s a textbook right-conservative agenda.
yes, karl marx famously wrote about the deportation of migrants in his book “mein kampf”
Well, that’s what the leader says.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Allard
“Han har istället beskrivit sin ideologiska hemvist som populism och nationalism på marxistisk grund”
Populism + nationalism based on marxism.
Allard har sedan bildandet av partiet allt mer tagit avstånd från den svenska vänstern, då han menar att den avlägsnat sig från arbetarrörelsens ursprungliga ideal. Han har istället beskrivit sin ideologiska hemvist som populism och nationalism på marxistisk grund, vilket han menar inte går att placera in på den moderna vänster–höger-skalan.
Mellan 2022 och 2025 medverkade Allard på den av Sverigedemokraterna grundade mediekanalen Riks. Det första avsnittet av programmet med namnet “Allard” hade premiär 5 november 2022. Fokus var att diskutera dagsaktuella samhällsfrågor och intervjuer med andra samhällsdebattörer.
He himself claims that you can’t really place their politics on the scale, because he picks ideas from both sides. Yeah, their politics are messy, but they have very fascist and white-supremacist overtones, and they gladly work with nazis. So I don’t personally care for trivial bickering about definitions here.
Dude basically read Ayn Rand and thought “whoa yeah, that’s the shit”, when in actuality it’s just shit.
Honestly, it’s like when right-wingers want everything privatised and scream that taxation is theft, but they’re totally happy with having taxes pay for their stuff. Just because they like to benefit from socialist policies doesn’t mean that they’re socialists.
yeah and the nazis named themselves national socialists so i dont see your point
Why do you even bother when you don’t know anything about the party? The leader was kicked out of the youth part of the most leftist party in the parliament in 2014. And he was kicked out for being too extreme left (he had supported the Revolutionary Front). And he started a pod with a guy who had also been kicked out for the same reason.
Well. Its well known they have some left options and a lot of far right opinions. Doesn’t matter if he once identified as a extreme leftist. He is now supporting way more far right opinions. It’s just facts. Do as you want with the facts.
What’s your argument here exactly? That having once held left wing views means all future positions can’t possibly be right wing despite all evidence to the contrary?
There was once this guy Mussolini who was a fervent communist iirc…
Seem to recall he got a bit rightish in later life
political beliefs of people aren’t static. it’s been 12 years
Using mullvad through Tailscale…
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And users have the choice to not fund his ability to do so in the future by finding a different place to spend their money.
Vote with your wallet is something not everyone believes in anymore, but at the same time, this doesn’t really have anything to do with the company’s values. It’s a simple equation. Giving the company money means this guy receives money. So people want to stop giving him money by proxy.
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And everybody else has the freedom to not support him or his business. So, a win win for freedom then.
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Customers also have the freedom to divest from his product as a direct consequence of his political activism, which many are doing.
On top of that, the far-left doesn’t exist. All who protest against capitalism and the fascist elite, all those that support social liberation, are comrades and allies of liberty.
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Is that guy funding the far-left in the room with you right now? He seems to play an important roll for you.
How is the Mullvad guy far right? I thought the Örebro Party was a Marxist party focused on expanding socialized services, like expanding healthcare, reducing costs for public transport, shortening the work week while keeping full pay, etc.
They are a confusing mix or far left and far right ideas and are a person cult around Allard that came from the left but has bridged the horse shoe and gone xenophobic totalitarian nationalist.
Like, he has his own bodyguards or security agency?
(My understanding is it’s a local political party that operates in one town.)
Like, he has his own bodyguards or security agency?
Very few politicians here have that. No idea if he does, but it doesn’t seem likely.
They are a local political party operating out of the town Örebro, they have some regional seats in the region that’s also called Örebro.
Local and regional politics is still important though. Having fascists diddle around with that is bad news.
Sweet, I found another worthless user to block
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