The amount of hate on mullvad for what they openly acknowledged was a personal donation from someone who was a founder sure does seem like it’s astroturfing against an otherwise solid vpn provider with a better trackrecord and more transparency then most.
Seems like the Same sort of ppl who would pay for services with a bank card and then be shocked when that links them to an account.
What do these people want? Should Mullvad fire this person? On what grounds? Do people honestly think companies should have a say over what their employees or members spend their personal money on? That seems like a fascist attitude to me.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
the problem is that the same people who buy vpn services are the people who care that parties like he supports don’t get to power… so when they learn that their money (that they paid for the vpn) directly helped to pay for that donation (via the company that made him rich) they are understendably pissed.
edit: this guy below said it much better than me https://lemmy.world/post/51539700/25684523
I would hope that such people would think their own political beliefs and private donations are none of their employers business. I would hope people would pause and think “what happens if this gets flipped on me” if suddenly donating to say anti-fascist causes where to become a fireable offense I bet those same people would be pretty upset
Just seems like very poorly thought out reason for rejecting a service like Mullvad especially given that the company put out a statement that did not defend the donation and distanced themselves from the persons personal views which they most likely didn’t know until well after the check was cashed.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but I think there might be a less organic reason why this is being pushed, like maybe Mullvad is difficult for certain agencies to strong arm due to their discouraging of using traditional trackable payment methods and having well secured servers.
Difference is I don’t own a company, but you are more than welcome to have a soured opinion of the company I work for for employing me based in whatever political beliefs I hold. How is this any different than boycotting JKR for her right wing TERF donations?
Me giving Mullvad money will directly put money in this co-founder’s pocket to give to facists, not just as an employee but as a stake holder in that company. No, he can’t be fired, and I would also not like to be fired for my political beliefs, but the population is absolute free to chose not to spend money at establishments that hosts those views.
I think you can apply Occam’s razor here. Do people just not want to fund someone with express interest in racist/racist/nazist ideology like with JKR, Musk, Trump etc. or is there a conspiracy that 3-letter agencies are sour they can’t crack Mullvad and so want people to use other services?
Hey, I’m a real person who organically discovered this news and made behavioral changes based on the news.
I am not a nazi. I do not want to support nazi policies or beliefs or people who would strengthen and distribute Nazi policies or beliefs. If someone supports forcibly relocating citizens based off their bloodline history or the color of their present day skin, I think they should be as far away from a position of power as society can possibly manage while still treating them like a human.
I believe, based on the Mullvad news, that one of the main benefactors if mullvad - meaning one of the guys who got a % for every euro I spent on the service - actively and meaningfully supports a national party with policies akin to Nazis. I want as much of my money to go to NOT-Nazis as possible, ideally 100%. So I left Mullvad for… I think it’s airvpn. Or ivpn actually, although I considered airvpn.
I don’t think this is a crazy response. I also wish it was the overwhelmingly common response.
meaning one of the guys who got a % for every euro I spent on the service - actively and meaningfully supports a national party with policies akin to Nazis. I want as much of my money to go to NOT-Nazis as possible, ideally 100%. So I left Mullvad for… I think it’s airvpn. Or ivpn actually, although I considered airvpn
Unless you fully audited every founder, owner, and staff member at IVPN (Nick Pestell et al.) or AirVPN (Paolo Brini / the activist group behind it), how do you know they don’t hold similar political views or make donations privately to similar effect? I couldnt find anything looking them up and it seems very unlikely they are fascist algigned, but i think you can understand my point here, unless you have an explicit statement from the company, its very possible they could have a closet fascist in the ranks.
I don’t mean to say the posts here are entirely fake, i mean to say the outrage being stoked seems short sighted, While i agree with not wanting my money to support fascist causes, I don’t consider someone’s personal donations or how they spend their money any of their employers business, nor would i want to live in a society where an employer or a business gets to have a say in those things. I read mullvads response, if they had doubled down and defended the guy that would be one thing, but they clearly have to walk a careful tightrope due to a difficult situation that i believe the other founders genuinely did not know about until it came out in the news.
BTW here are the only VPN providers i could find that have openly and explicitly declared anti-fascist beliefs:
NymVPN / " I am proud to be an anarchist against fascism." - Harry Halpin
I wonder what kind of response you’d get if you emailed VPN providers to ask about the personal donation habits or political leanings of their founders, maybe thats a project i’ll take on another day. Probably something worth knowing and keeping public.
I think your responses to this are taking extreme theoretical positions that aren’t true. So for instance, the extreme theory of “I don’t support them because one of their (still financially connected) founders is a nazi” is “I must research all company’s I support for their political beliefs” and that’s not true - that’s an extreme stance.
My real stance is “everyone should strive to be as ethical a consumer as they possibly can be - given their time, energy, and financial situations.” It’s not my job to research every company and I don’t have time/energy to research every provider of every product I consume; but I do what I can. It’s the job of the journalist to dig up these meaningful stories and distribute them to their community, that’s why that job is so important. And easily getting these stories distributed to me is why I’m on Lemmy (or back in the day reddit).
So no, I do not have to research everyone to reduce my euros from going to Nazi’s. If my options are known Nazi or unknown something - I expect a reasonable person to always go with the unknown.
And I do want to live in a society where Nazi beliefs have real life consequences, including and especially at work. The extreme stance is “all beliefs can be held against you at work” and that’s wrong. There’s a difference between a person wanting their government to tax them 2% less and a person wanting their government to expunge all black people to countries they may have never even visited. There’s a difference between being a part of the NRA and being a part of the KKK. You can be in party that worsens your country and your quality of life and makes the world slowly worse (like pre-trump modern republicans in the US or the CDU in Germany). You can’t be in party that is actively looking to dismantle civil rights, harm the out-groups, and make society rapidly worse (like Republicans, AfD, reform for britain, or the Nazi party).
Everyone should want to live in a society where, if their coworkers are racist their company does something about it. Because that gets rid of racists at best or at worst it makes them sneakier - more quiet. Their has to be societal consequences for holding societally destructive beliefs. Should they starve? No. We should have Universal Basic Income. Should they be kicked out of their home? No, they should own their home and there shouldn’t be landlords. Should they be removed from any position of power and barred from ever holding one again? Yes, absolutely. They should be “tarred and feathered”, we should put a badge on them that says “dangerous and hateful” and we should treat them as such - they only get to hold jobs which can’t hurt other people they seek to hurt.
There is a difference between ideas destructive to society and most normal ideas and you should want to treat them differently.
You do make an excellent point on the differentiation between work and private lives. The majority of jobs I’ve ever worked would have fired me for my political donations and/or commentary, and as I am not an American Conservative, that would not be a good career move XD
Benefit of the doubt that you aren’t asking in bad faith.
Most people aren’t demanding Mullvad fire the founder, but that also doesn’t mean that we have to give him money to donate to fascists.
Mullvad are free do what they like with their right wing founder. Just like customers are free to refuse to fund anti-immigration policies. If Mullvad doesn’t like that, it’s up to them to decide how to appeal to customers.
Nobody is denying that Mullvad is a good product, but I need this specific vpn less than I need a safer future for my children.
Most people aren’t demanding Mullvad fire the founder,
except they kind of are by saying they’re switching because of his donation specifically, which implies to me that those same people would have to think its acceptable for a company to know and have influence over its founders political beliefs or donations. Like what other result are people expecting other then to have him step down from the org (because probably it would be illegal to actually oust them over political donations, so it’d have to be voluntary anyway).
Lets say it was the case for you, you founded a VPN company and turns out your partner is a fascist but you had no idea when it started because it wasnt until 5 years after the founding that they started dropping hints, what would you do? Start a brand new company? You could pressure them to step down privately, you could release a statement saying the company does not support those causes, and you could do everything in your power internally to ensure that person (and really NO person) has access to any kind of logging or things that could expose users (and thats also just practical in terms of keeping your reputation as a VPN provider in tact really). Mullvad has aready done the last bit, any VPN provide worth using would have to be setup in a similar way really.
Benefit of the doubt that you aren’t asking in bad faith.
How would this be in bad faith? I’m saying i think its short sighted because it seems to me they didn’t think through the entire consequences of what happens if it gets flipped on you or someone you support, while ignoring the things that would actually put more limitations on their own risks, primarily if you just switch to another VPN provide but dont ALSO stop paying with a card or something linked to your name/bank then you are not actually improving your own situation much.
It’s similar to the reaction for Proton “exposing” a customer’s payment information, of course i dont agree with them doing it, but I also understand they are a corporation and subject to laws of their country and court orders so the lesson should not be “dont use this VPN provider because they will rat on you” it should be “Dont give VPN providers enough information TO rat on you”
It’s a shame one of the founders funds Nazis now, I won’t be renewing
I’ve just seen this.
Do you know any good alternatives?
Tunnel bear
iVPN looks good
I’m glad i left Mullvad behind when they stopped supporting port forwarding.
Can someone catch me up, I thought people liked Mullvad… but this thread seems to suggest otherwise. What did I miss?
My understanding is one of mullvads primary owners and creators donates a significant portion of their country’s far right party’s annual budget. Their policies, last I checked, included things like remigration or the forced expulsion of citizens based off of arbitrary and immutable characteristics (think bloodline or skin color). They’re akin to the AfD or Republicans. Theoretically a meaningful % of money spent on Mullvad goes to a person actively trying to make the world worse, like Elon Musk or JK Rowling.
So some people, including me, stopped supporting mullvad until the person is completely financially and influentially disconnected from the company.
Yeah, but what have immigrants done for us?!
Performed menial, back-breaking labor at rates well below the legal minimums? Contribute to our economy and society while being treated as absolute garbage? Seek out a better life while being spit on by those around them? Have a lower property and violent crime rate than the general public while being multiple times more likely to be a victim of a crime?
Wait, why am I supposed to hate them again?
Appreciate the explanation. What’s the generally trusted/suggested VPN then?
As another user said, IVPN or airvpn were the ones that came up in my last search. I have removed proton for them having the same trump supporting tech bros problem.
Notable that mullvad calls out the situation themselves
“societies need a great diversity of ideas, initiatives and organizations who can be tested and sifted until the best ones remain” -Mullvad.
This apparently includes nazi ideas
You didn’t miss anything. Haters just finally got a reason to crawl out of their dirt caves
I’ve been recommending Mullvad DNS for its adblock functionality. Quad9 does not provide this.
I am now seeking recommendations for an equivalent I can recommend to friends and family for use on devices that do not easily support system-wide adblocking.
You can go with the default Adguard DNS configuration https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
AdGuard maintains a list of DNS providers; there are several with ad blocking.
Works great on my phone. Thinking of enabling it on my desktop, too, but I’m not too bothered there, using uBlock Origin. 👍
i just bought myself a one month credit today… damn, i definitely should’ve done more research. can anyone recommend a VPN that isn’t fascistic?
Funny, I’ve been having a lot of problems with Mullvad DNS so I just switched to Quad9.
I use Quad9 where I can, but admittedly also have some reliability issues. Their local PoP will drop all requests for a couple minutes at least a few times a week. It’s a shame since it’s the closest/best recursive resolver otherwise. CloudFlare is similarly close, but they don’t support EDNS, so I’ve had problems because of that.
Been using next DNS free DNS. They get overloaded sometimes but usually work fine.
