Comment by LeoPanthera
4 days ago
A lot of people are abandoning Mullvad because their CEO is directly funding a far-right political party.
As they should, IMHO.
4 days ago
A lot of people are abandoning Mullvad because their CEO is directly funding a far-right political party.
As they should, IMHO.
Purity politics, doesn't work sorry, just highlights hypocrisy.
I can't see how this has any bearing on the functioning of Mullvad, if they were campaigning on circumventing privacy rights it'd be a different story.
Sometimes people don't want to financially support people or companies that engage in certain behaviors they consider unethical. Whether or not the product functions is irrelevant in such a situation.
It's more the soapboxing that's the issue. I long for the days when not everything in life is given a political twist. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.
People not wanting to give money to someone they don't like is now purity politics and hypocrisy?
That actually signals that the CEO has a legit reason for Mullvad to work really well.
Sure. But the political party in question has an explicit goal of rounding up and "deporting" all immigrants and all the children of immigrants (including those who grew up in Sweden and are citizens).
Besides being reprehensible, that kind of mass trafficking requires mass surveillance. It simply can't be done without it.
This kind of surveillance is antithetical to what Mullvad promises.
There of course could be a "privacy for me and my customers, but not for thee" thing in their minds.
But I don't trust that CEO whatsoever, and I don't trust the rest of Mullvad's leadership either because their response to the backlash was mealy mouthed "everyone is entitled to their opinion, let's all be civil" minimization schlock. They didn't give a fuck; they just wanted the PR problem to go away.
Mullvad's VPN service might continue to be trustworthy, but... I have other options. And it could be enshittified over time, just like so many other things. At least one CEO has a motivation to enable mass surveillance.
I'm also just not going to knowingly put money into the hands of someone I know will use it for evil, if and when I have a choice, which in this case I do.
Do you know if there are other/general replacements for their browser extension that allows choosing a server/location per domain?