this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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Could someone fully explain the mullvad controversy. From my knowledge so far it seems like the cofounder donated to an alt right party and it's probably a bad sign for the company. Anything I'm missing?

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[–] willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Mullvad users who got mad simplified this to Mullvad fees finance a Nazi party directly.

You are making this up.

Those of us mad understand how the money changes hands.

It is mathematically correct to say that a portion of the energy I may contribute to Mullvad will end up financing fascism.

This isn't only about the political donations. That's a coowner/cofounder we are talking about. That's significant. If some rank and file schmuck donated to nazis in his spare time and not a cofounder, it would be less bad. Still bad, but less damaging.

This cofounder has outsized infuence on how the culture of Mullvad is shaping up.

Do I want to support that when there are better, more private, VPN companies without the nazi cofounders? For example NymVPN mixnet.

There is no good reason to prefer Mullvad.

It'd be a different story is we only had two VPN companies and both had nazi founders. Then we'd have to weigh privacy vs nazism. But that's not our situation right now.

[–] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago

And not a small donation either. He contributed 72% of their entire funding in 2025.

[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

more private

I thought Mullvad was famous for being the gold standard VPN provider. Can you elaborate on who is more private?

[–] whatiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago

They suggested nym which uses a technology called a mixnet that’s almost self explanatory: you have a network that mixes up the path communication takes so that it’s harder to determine the sender.

Unfortunately that’s got a bunch of problems that basically boil down to it’s more complicated and therefore easier to screw up and the more compromised nodes an attacker has in the mixnet the easier it becomes for someone to screw up.

It’s cool tech but not trustworthy yet compared to the simple alternatives.

Also nym will let you log in with google credentials. Theres some very careful scrutiny a user would want to apply to that.

I do not think nym is a bad vpn like service thing, just that its not comparable to mullvad.