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.

Wikipedia of the party in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party#

Doesn't really sound all that far-right to me. Nationalist, sure.

I'm not Swedish though, so I would be interested in the thoughts of those who are actually affected by Örebropartiet's policies.

I understand Mullvad has historically been a leader in privacy among the big VPN options. What are some other equally affordable and user friendly options that you all have been satisfied with? Think for someone who saw Mullvad advertised during the Super Bowl but looking to leave because of this news.

Slightly tangential on Swedish society, there are similarities between USA and Sweden. There's a large segment of society that is white and very blond, and there's a largish segment which is not. Along that same line there are all kinds of divisions: economic, education, religious, sets of values, and of access to things and possibilities. What pisses me off is that the cast of "CEOs of successful companies" live in an sphere of privilege where they really are not bothered at all by the brown people. They in fact have plenty of places to go, a vast archipelago, out of reach for anybody who can't afford a boat. Though they get all the benefits, including cheap qualified labor from people who had to leave their homelands displaced by poverty, conflict and war. I'll switch VPN provider too.

One of these days we will elect somebody who is corrupt and morally corrupt, incompetent and poorly educated and who'll promise to screw us over many times and in many positions, and we will let him just do so so that there are concentration camps for the brown people.

There have been multiple posts about this and hundreds of comments, so there is clearly appetite to discuss it, although none of the submitted links have been particularly detailed.

I'm going to merge the other threads into this one, which is why you'll see some anachronistic timestamps.

Some commentary here: https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.h...

Daniel Berntsson is still involved with Mullvad and part-owns Mullvad's parent company with his co-founder.

To the people using Mullvad I have two sincere and unpopular questions: do you actively scrutinize and examine the key people of every service and product you use, or is it just a reflexive change of footing whenever you happen upon news like this? Also, do you really switch, or is it just a heat of moment kind of thing and an opportunity to profess yourself?

Mullvad is a great service, and their founder in a country outside the US donates to a party he prefers? I don't see the issue.

Also why post these journalist links that require you to be a paying member to view the article? Share an archive link no one is gonna pay for that noise.

"Mullvad AB and its parent company Amagicom AB are 100% owned by founders [1 person] and Daniel Berntsson [...]"[0]

So I'll assume he owns about 50%. Well, that ends my usage of Mullvad.[1] I appreciate that probably many of Mullvad's employees have different views, and obviously Berntsson has every right to his opinions and to express them, and I also appreciate that someone can have control over an opinionated company and run it for one particular set of reasons but not for other causes that someone believes in, but in the end I just don't want my money supporting anti-people causes.

[0] https://mullvad.net/en/about

[1] If it was a small amount, say less than 5% or maybe 10%, I might have decided differently. But it's still millions, so probably not.

A big question I suppose is what is Mozilla going to do in reaction? As Mozilla VPN is white labelled Mulvad I think

Is it so hard to imagine that someone willing to take such a principled stance on privacy that they start a company to provide a privacy focused vpn company that they also hold other extreme views?

It takes a certain kind of personality to become a founder especially more do for such a strongly principled company and adhere to it.

Örebropartiet is like the weirdest party in Sweden. It's named after "Örebro", a Swedish city with 125k population. The party's founder, Markus Allard, used to be far left politician before turning far right.

Their party program is all over the place. They stand for free dental care, direct democracy and deporting immigrants.

Marcus is also known for profanity and foul language in council meetings.

An oddity in Swedish politics is that if a local party manages to get 12% of the votes in a constituency they are eligible for getting a seat in parliament, and can skip the regular 4% popular vote rule.

Örebropartiet actually has a chance to get into national government next election (Fall 2026) since their local support is quite strong. Times are weird

To be fair, Örebropartiet can also be called an extreme left party. It’s complicated…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

Why doesn’t Apple just make a built in iOS native vpn that can be toggled (effectively) from the swipe down menu control and is paid monthly or part of iCloud

I saw this a couple of days ago, here's the original article that broke the news, in Swedish: https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropa...

It includes a short statement from the CEO.

Their stance seems to be "people can do things on their own personal time":

https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116822244689326681

I'm Swedish, but never heard of Örebropartiet before. I tried looking into their website and it doesn't say a lot.

Translated from Swedish wikipedia: --- Örebropartiet was founded by Markus Allard in the spring of 2014, when he was recently expelled from the Left Party and the Young Left. [...] Among the party's main issues are reduced politicians' salaries, reduced bureaucracy, civil servant responsibility, assimilation policy and the repatriation of people who do not adapt. ---

I think it is very reasonable to demand that people try to integrate when coming to a new country - learn the language, get into the culture. As a Swedish person I think this is missing from our integration politics, which is an often talked about topic in the last years.

In the end this is a political question and sadly instead of engaging in dialogue the reaction to these questions feels like it most often leads to polarization and division. Inclusion means also including people with different beliefs and respecting their opinions, even if we don't share them. Through understanding comes empathy.

Can recommend "The Righteous Mind" by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt who discusses this in a book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

Fun fact: we get a dopamine release when taking an opposing stance and then seeing (subjective) proof of our stance. It requires self-discipline and fighting your impulses to avoid polarization.

Why is this an issue? Isn’t he, like any one of us, entitled to hold the political views he wants and support the candidates or parties he wants?

Looks like cancel mobs are back on the menu

I’m not Swedish. Does Mullvad do what it says on the tin? That’s all that matters.

The CEO’s extracurricular activities are none of my business.

I try to turn it other way in my head, like if Mullvad got to know somehow political views of some of their customers and say "We don't like what you say, so we decide to end our business with you. We don't want our infra to be used to spread opinions like yours."

Well guess I won’t be renewing my subscription this month then.

Any other verified sources?

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

I wonder, if you model political positions as nations, whether trading benefits you all or whether autarky leads to long term relevance.

This is not news. Mullvad has been known to be right-adjacent for a long time, it's a big reason I use them.

Welp, that vanishes my support for mullvad, despite I did recommended it to many of my friends who doesn’t want/can setup their own.

Im not against people having different political opinions, I personally agree with things from each side and disagree with them both too on other matters, plus having my own third option that doesn’t fit any side. But I am certainly against a company marketing itself as a “defender of personal and human rights and freedom”, yet they are sponsoring a party that obviously doesn’t hold these values, this company will report individuals in the future to deport them maybe, 5 years later they are reporting others for disagreeing with whatever agenda that party is having, it’s always a slippery slope, never think it will end at xyz and that will it.

Goddammit it’s like companies are ALWAYS destined to turn to evil one way or another, it’s just how long it will take is the question. It’s a reminder that you should always host your own, trust nobody, none.

I think this is more nuanced than this article or mullvad themselves present it as. What you give to mullvad as a form of payment will end up in the pockets of the funding members which allows them to make relatively large political donations, but it's also not as deep as presented. What gets seemingly glossed over how involved large companies are in pushing parties like orebro into relevancy.

As a basic example, youtube started pushing a LOT of anti-immigrant videos. I never watched them since after few minutes it's obvious that it is clear ragebait, but I keep getting them recommended without showing any interest in them and they're all clocking in anywhere from 300k to millions of views.

There is virtually no way to resist the temptation of being anti-immigrant/racist/whatnot when you see abusive behavior exploiting the good will of the european union especially when there is state level abuse to extract additional funding from the shared support pool. This being extremely unpopular gives motivation to keep all of this under wraps as much as possible which only fuels the fire when "information" is made available on social media platforms where you benefit from blowing this out of proportion and then if you try to question it you are labeled which naturally breeds resentment.

--

Scrolled for few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6-zhxpNsVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARKZMX4iGZ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlI4ICp-OI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX-IKLSFH_I

Örebropartiet is not a extremist far-right party. All their policies is extreme far-left except immigration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

Mullvad has always been a bit suspect with regard to their settings or lack their of, however what are you trying to insinuate? That founders are not political? That one "wing" of some hypothetical bird is in some way disconnected from its mirror wing? Regardless making something such as a VPN is and has been commoditiezed in current year to such an extent that whatever may be your motives, you can only do good by encouraging the userbase to not pay for said services.

The wikipedia article about the party is pretty interesting [1]. "The party has also been described as both right-wing populist and left-wing populist as well as left-conservative"

The party was founded after the founder was thrown out of the Left party for liking a far-left extremist group on Facebook and not backing down from that. Since then the party has evolved to also include goals traditionally attributed to the right, like large scale remigration and a stricter immigration policy.

The party also seems inconsequentially small, even at the municipal and regional level. They have 0 seats at the national level

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

Great, I will definitely go out of my way to purchase their products.

Uncontrolled migration needs to stop.

Any suggestions for a VPN service with similar security standards as Mullvad?

Damn. Well, if that gets confirmed I'm going to get my company off mullvad.

previously discussed[flagged: 251 comments]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508

Aren't far-right parties opposed to government control and censorship? Ideally a provider should be politically neutral, but I'm wondering if it's preferable to have one that is opposed to government control and censorship.

Such a convenient time frame with all think-of-the-children bs wave to point fingers at the one of the best VPN services our there with spotless reputation and raise a hysteria with duplicated stream of posts, isn't it?

Surely just a coincidence.

does it change your trust in the company?

For some people, the answer is obviously yes. For others, they'll judge Mullvad purely by its track record, audits, and technical design.

Honestly, you could say the same about the CEO of ANDURIL in the US - the Oculus guy...but he just cares about the US and wants to make money by making weapon systems etc.

Is he a bad person? Is he a patriot? Who knows, I ain't gonna play the ultimate judge game - but he did release a cool gameboy clone which is literally the closest I will ever get to his work... [1]

[1] https://modretro.com

I am surprised that people are surprised, all these services are by people for people who are marginalized. Therefore, they are either far-right or far-left. When its business, its more likely to be a far-right since they are more business-oriented. The far left folks usually make a repo and give it away or try to organize some collective effort.

Left/right doesn't matter much for a no-logs VPN.

Up/Down (authoritarian/libertarian) is what matters there.

If he has high allegiance to the extant power structure then promises should be questioned.

If he is for radical decentralization and antiwar then I'm more likely to trust promises made about privacy and autonomy.

Then there's international confusion about left/right. Scandinavia is known as a good place to run a business because businesses regulation is much lighter than places like the US which are heavily regulated. In the US business regulation is "left wing" in Scandinavia it's "right wing".

We'd use a 14-dimensional vector for political positioning if we wanted to be studious but most folks are just looking for a friend/enemy distinction. Even many of the comments here looking to dump a well-regarded service if either "tastes great" or "less filling" is confirmed. The false dialectic as means of control and all that jazz.

The party in question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party. Doesn't sound extremist far-right to me. Many of its positions would be considered center-left or even far left in much of the world.

Already had this topic discussed several times this week.

This is like the third duplicate I saw in a week

Discussed three days ago (251 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508

The other owner replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800

Why a shame? Is far right bad? Are far left good then? Genuine question, not a troll, because I keep hearing opposite things.

Sigh, people that bring politics to the forefront with everything are so miserable.

Aren’t Swedish political parties mostly publicly funded?

If this is real I will stop my monthly subscriptions.

Oh yes, sure, the party started by avowed Marxist Markus Allard is 'far-right'. For those who can read (or know how to translate) Swedish here's an article [1] on marxist.se - well-known hidey hole for far-right extremists - on how the expulsion of Markus Allard from the communist party (they call themselves 'the left party' but they're one of several communist parties in Sweden) is an 'attack on the left'.

Allard is a traditional leftie, someone who thinks in terms of class struggle and power to the people. He also happens to be rather outspoken about the failure of Swedish parties on all sides to handle the problems related to the excessive migration Sweden and Europe have been dealing with for the last few decades. This has put a target on his back for the everyone-I-don't-agree-with-is-Hitler crowd so his party is of course 'far-right'. Well, if that is what 'far-right' means it doesn't seem all that problematic so I wonder why people always complain so much about the claimed rise of the 'far-right'. See what that leads to, you obsessive labellers of those who dare to question the desired narrative? When everything is far-right the term has lost its meaning just as claims of 'racism' or '*-phobia' have lost theirs.

[1] https://marxist.se/uteslutningen-av-allard-en-attack-mot-van...

Still waiting to cancel Big Tech for donating to Trump [0] and they donated more than a million+.

So why haven't we cancelled Big Tech yet?

[0] https://www.commoncause.org/articles/big-tech-is-donating-mi...

I use Mullvad because it physically prevents anyone from logging my data.

What a co-owner does with his personal money in a local Swedish municipal election has zero impact on the code protecting my traffic.

Did a quick research - calling a party that campaigns for a 30-hour work week and socialist dental care 'far-right' just because they have a strict immigration policy shows how carelessly people throw labels around these days.

archive link? the post got deleted

The Örebro Party (Örebropartiet) split from the socialist Left Party in 2014.

Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.

> While Allard has described himself as a Communist, and a Marxist, at its founding in March 2014 he defined the Örebro Party as "broad left". At that time the party considered itself a "local party that wants to carry on the labour movement's ideals", and "not interested in administrating the current society".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

Swede here. That's not even close to accurate. Örebropartiet is not extremist, but I would absolutely label them radical populist left-economic-leaning nationalists. Please do some research and make up your own mind. They're a tiny local party active in Örebro municipality where their founder and leader loudly points out clearly wasteful use of government funds, or more or less corrupt decisions made by leading party figures in other parties on local matters. The party leader is known for ridiculing competing parties party members on debates.

Where the Örebropartiet (Örebro Party) usually are called extremist is in questions regarding immigration. They are of the opinion that people that move to Sweden should not integrate but also assimilate, and quickly, find a job. For some people, this might sound extreme, but I would argue that more than half of the Swedish population (and its parties) nowadays share this view, similar to how Japanese people and society broadly want people that move their to assimilate.

Companies funding far-left parties seem to be much bigger problem.

A headline and 20 comments and no mention of what this party actually stands for. Only simple labels such as "far-right". Ehh. The Republican Party in America is EXTREMELY far right by Swedish standards. So maybe one should base this on the actual substance rather than labels?

Did anyone actually look into the "far-right" party that this purports to be?

The Örebro Party (Swedish: Örebropartiet, ÖP) is a local populist political party in Örebro, Sweden, led by Markus Allard. It holds seats in the Örebro municipal and regional assemblies, focusing on local populist policies such as reducing politicians' salaries, stricter migration, and free dental care.

Sweden has undergone a horrible transformation in the last several years where gang warfare and especially bombings have skyrocketed. Most of the new gang violence in the last several years is from migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, after Sweden implemented a generous immigration policy.

https://nct-cbnw.com/an-explosion-a-day-in-sweden-what-is-go...

There's nothing to indicate that this party is "far right" at all. It's a populist-based party but the stance on immigration is definitely linearly correlated to the violence that was brought in by immigration. Lowering politicians' salaries and free dental care doesn't sound very far right to me.

The mechanism of VPN is pooling together many users and making them indistinguishable to the outside, providing plausible deniability. Outsiders can see a user belongs to the pool, but they can't tell if they are 'good' or 'bad'.

It's a similar mechanism that cryptocurrency, or money laundering uses. It's very possible for 'good' users to be recruited into the pool for no other reason than to provide plausible deniability for the 'bad' members. If I wanted to run an ilegal operation like cybercrime or drugs, I would probably use a VPN and a crypto pool, and try to get legitimate users to desire using VPNs for reasons like gaming latency, or avoiding taxes on 1K/month income.

It's well known that Mullvad provides lower than market prices when compared to competitors, and that they offer stricter no logs policies. Yeah, maybe they are providing a basic privacy right, or maybe they are providing shelter for criminals. Tradeoff old as time. But with prices possibly being subsidized, it makes sense that their incentive model is not to collect fees for usage, but to provide a wide enough user pool such that the anonimity is more effective.

What's interesting is that both far-right free-market anarchist users and far-left Not for profit Free Software socialists appear to be shocked that their anonimity pools contains them both. Kind of like how the lights went up at the club at 6 am and you realize who you've been smooching in the dark.

Additional context here is that they donated 75% of *all donations* to that party last year. 3x everyone else combined.

And that party is not just "kind of right wing", they believe in large scale "remigration" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration), which, to save you clicking the link, means "a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry".

There is a wealth of difference between when random companies throw a few thousand at whatever the leading parties are, and this.

The party in question seems to be an anti-immigration strongly secularist left wing party with Marxist roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

I am not sure "far right" is an accurate label. Maybe populist? Its a mix that would probably get a lot of support in other European countries.

Disgusting. You cannot trust a racist with your privacy.

[flagged]

I used Mullvad before this because they passed a bunch of tests and legally denied claims to user data. I don’t have the reference but it was on HN.

So who do people recommend now?

Disappointing if true. I can't read the original article[1], but the translation seems to agree. I've paid for Mullvad for _years_. Looks like I'll be taking my money elsewhere.

[1]: https://www.flamman.se/techprofil-ger-miljoner-till-orebropa...

I love how we pretend to live in a free democratic society where everyone is free to make up their own mind and vote for what they believe...

...as long as they don't have opinions that differ from ours, in that case we might punch em in the face...

I'm still amused that so many people got brainwashed into thinking that VPNs give privacy :D

> The Örebro Party (Swedish: Örebropartiet, ÖP) is a political party in Sweden. The party was initially only a local party in Örebro, Sweden. Markus Allard is the party leader. According to Allard the party cannot be placed anywhere on the traditional left-right spectrum. Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.[3][4]

I see no problems

Any of the Swedes in here can corroborate the claims in the article about this right wing group? Especially about the extreme anti-immigration statements and put that in full translation and context?

Also what this group leader has done in Örebro to contextualize this quote

> ”I hope they will do similar things on the national level as in Örebro”, writes Daniel Berntsson to Flamman.

[dead]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Far right? It's run by a literal marxist communist.

This is a bizarre thread.

People are surprised that a privacy-oriented businessman is right-wing is very strange.

"Millions" in the title is also misleading in this context - it's millions in Swedish Kronor, which is roughly $500K USD. A lot, but the title seems intentionally misleading.

I've also never really understood the cycle of boycotting things because you don't like how an individual spends their own money. Almost every company will employ people who have values you severely disagree with, and put money toward those causes. And turning to Proton as the alternative is... a choice?

Far right isn't good enough for these people. They are radical-ultra-far-hard-alt right.

What's going on? Proton faced a similar scandal recently. I think in their case sponsored a video by a far right vlogger. After that I saw people recommending Mullvad as an alternative.

Cherry on top of a killer VPN service. Never looking back. Conservatives deliver.

Please stop this high school cafeteria witch hunt bullshit. It's played out. Either use their stuff and support them or don't.

I pay for and use Mullvad VPN. I believe they value everyone's privacy and I believe they are competent technologists.

I don't care about politics. I will continue to buy and use Mullvad VPN.