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.”
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)