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- on even their own economic rules tell them why it will fail 🙄 in c/onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2d ago
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026
So why is it when an individual high up in the company, someone with decision power and who directly benefits from sales, does something that hurts the public perception, suddenly you’re asking us to just ignore it?
This is where its clear you you aren’t actually listening to what im saying. I didnt say it should be ignored. My point is that i think people are learning and sharing the wrong solution, The solution isnt to use your name associated bank account to pay a different VPN provider, its to avoid giving ANY vpn provider information that could link you to the account, and verify that they don’t keep logs. You can do this with LOTS of different vpn providers by looking at their transparency reports and how they respond to court orders, but very few people actually do that, they’d rather just be perforamtive and say “im voting with my wallet” which is lazy and does nothing to improve the situation for anyone.
This same sort of thing happens anytime a VPN company (like proton) responds to a legal court order, everyone was all “How could they do this to us!?!?” and not “Why would an activist pay using a credit card?, maybe we should teach people how payment systems work so they can avoid this in the future” I think we should focus more on the latter, preventative education, so that less people can be targeted or exposed in general.
I see this as a teachable moment, I’m not trying to get people to ignore the underlying issue, I just think it should be part of a more complete re-evaluation of how we all use and pay for VPN providers.
When i say its astroturfing, i don’t mean against mullvad alone, I think there is a coordinated effort going on to instill division and mistrust among vpn users and providers. I think the goal is to amplify negative publicity for any VPN provider they can, its becoming a trend now.
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026
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”
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026
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.
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 7 Sep 2026
he can, I paid using my credit card. He could disclose the list of clients and payments
So you’ve also learned the lesson of not paying with a credit card now right? Otherwise you are just as succeptible with the next vpn you use.
You dont take away the power to by shifting it to some other company which may or may not have less fascists. or some other fasicts (like ones working for the government now) could just as well get the info from your card issuer, or PayPal or whatever gateway you pay with.
know it sounds paranoid but how can you trust a Nazi when your life is on the line?
I don’t trust them, and I am equally untrusting of the payment processors and federal government that’s why I avoid paying for vpn or hosting services with anything connected to a bank account in my name. If you do that then they have nothing to expose.
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
Would you be okay with your employer or business partner getting to review every political donation you made during their employ or setting restrictions on what you could spend your money on?
I can understand the conflict if the guy was like in a position where he could reveal data about users but thats nowhere close to being the case because the entire company barely keeps any data in the first place
How will you know there isn’t any right wing staff at the next vpn you choose? Seems pretty short sighted.
I want my protection to be such that even if I know the enemy is actively monitoring the network they won’t be able to obtain anything useful. I wouldn’t want to use a service that exclusively targets people just on my side because that makes it easier to narrow down and target.
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
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.
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on Shutting down our public encrypted DNS servers and sponsoring Quad9 instead | Mullvad VPN in c/technology@lemmy.world · 6 Sep 2026
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)_/¯
A lot of folks just make their money because the line goes up, then instead of spending that money they borrow more using their old money (stocks) as collateral. So long as the line goes up those people have basically a continuing stream of income and credit.
Whenever it stops going up long enough for them to care they will start to introduce their version of UBI which will probably be something like Mr Lee’s KongBucks because every single one of these fuckers seems to have gotten the exact wrong message out of the novel Snow Crash.