Tbh I’d assume all CEOs are right-wing unless proven otherwise as the position itself exists to sit at the top of a business hierarchy. A company made up of leftists would’ve formed a cooperative instead. For me it becomes an issue worth talking about when a co-owner is using the money I pay them to advance an agenda I’d consider authoritarian, as it seems to be the case with Mullvad.
(I’m just chiming in with my opinion, of course it’s your right to avoid Proton either way.)
Not sure, why it’s a problem.
Why not judge the product by its quality rather than personal political opinions of their CEOs? So, the CEO donated his own money to a party that he supports? What’s the problem?
If the product is genuinely the best in the market, why would I abandon it in favor of less secure (DAITA) and less reliable (for me, at least) option?
Left and right in USA and Europe became so polarized and so closed in their own bubbles that it feels absolutely insane. Name-calling anyone who doesn’t share the same view as yourself a fascist is extremely stupid. It wasn’t the case 20 years ago, everyone respected and shared opposite beliefs.
It’s not a problem if you don’t care about anything going on in the world. But at the end the donations came from your money. It’s not like Mullvad grew green stuff on a tree. Indirectly you are the one supporting the cause. Imagine if you are in a war scenario and the company you buy products from, donates to your enemy. It’s your money going against what you believe in.
Most big companies eventually run into some kind of controversy whether it’s supply chains, politics, or executive choices. If we boycotted every brand over a founder’s personal views or a donation, we’d basically have no tech left to use.
At the end of the day, it’s better to focus on the product itself, how they handle your privacy, and if they’re transparent. Perfect moral alignment is pretty much impossible to find, so just aim for what works best for you.
Thanks for the feedback. Do you know where I can see detailed info on their servers like you mentioned? Did a quick search and could only find a status page about their servers.
Adding to the general discussion: this donation (paid among others by us users) is nothing minor and allowed the party to go for bigger elections. If you are not against such actions early on, you will be able to do even less once these companies/persons/parties etc. become bigger. Good luck for example trying to “boycott” amazon with all their AWS servers.. But can you boycott Mullvad at this stage? Absolutely.
I unfortunately don’t have experiences to share, but I’m severely unimpressed by some users in this thread. Looking to the forum guidelines, one of the key tenets is:
keep this a kind, friendly place for civilized public discourse
Even if your political views differ, I struggle to see the kindness in some of these responses, such as in highlighting that you’ll buy another year of support for what OP regards as a crisis. It’s far from respectful and just serves to weaken what little community we have to help one another and ward privacy rights.
Make another thread if you want to celebrate, but keep your eyes on the ball. OP is asking for experiences with IVPN, not political input.
Help them.
Proton isn’t anon account.
I haven’t seen evidence that Mullvad, IVPN, or Proton support fascists.
Mullvad hasn’t done anything differently…
You’re likely being downvoted for uselessly bringing politics into privacy discussion and mistating the extent, but obviously I’m not the person that downvoted you. I guess that’s the whole thread, but that could be the people opposing its view.
Bringing up/promoting stuff like this with Proton, Brave, and Mullvad is exactly what I would do if I was an authoritarian country/agency. I definitely think there’s people that have stayed on Chrome/Gmail because of this cringe reddit behavior..
I’m not saying anyone is a fed, it’s just the type of discourse that is counterproductive to advancing privacy for the world.
Yeah, lol. That is exactly what I was referring to. That entire situation snowballed into an avalanche of misinformation. Poor Andy just did a fundamentally bad job at communicating his core point, and thanks to the internet’s love for hyperbole, that misstep is probably going to haunt Proton for the rest of their existence.
Speaking of the intersection of misinformation and morality, I’ve used Brave as one of my browsers, and I’m definitely not thrilled about it. People are accusing me of supporting someone on a personal level (the CEO) and being transphobic. Meanwhile, the people who are telling me this, are literally telling me this over X. (yes I’m sure the hypocrisy and irony is lost on them)
It shows how difficult it is to find a project, franchise, or company head whose values actually align with your own. Mullvad makes a highly valid point that you shouldn’t judge an entire company and its services based on a single individual at the top. I think there’s a difference between a CEO making a stupid decision in his personal life, and a company on behalf of said company, actively funding hate group groups.
However, depending on your personal ethical boundaries, there are some depths you can refuse to plunge. If you reach that line and decide to walk away, I say go for it.
That being said, we really need to understand that a consumer using a product does not make them the scum of the Earth, and it definitely doesn’t make them equivalent to the bad actors running the company. Guilt by association is a flawed metric.
Obviously, there are varying degrees of severity, and the ethics are incredibly complicated. If your personal choice is to boycott, I fully support going for it, but we can’t aggressively judge others trying to shuffle around the same complex market. As the old saying goes, there’s really no ethical consumption under capitalism. Modern tech ecosystems sort of force us into using problematic products because monopolies, or lack of alternatives limit our choice choices.
Acknowledging that this entire thread is now off topic…
Andy Yen is not a victim. He propagated a ludicrous viewpoint that the most corrupt president in US history who openly encourages direct bribes from corporations would somehow be the one to crack down on big tech. This viewpoint indicates a clear lack of critical thinking and discernment, and an error in judgement like that could only be made by someone who is sympathetic to the views of said corrupt, madman president.
The current president of the United States is an enthusiastic fascist. The citizenship viewpoints expressed by this politician the Mullvad CEO donated to are also blatant fascism, racism, and ethno-nationalism (nazism). If you want to continue using Proton or Mullvad, by all means do so… they offer great products for the time being. But claiming that these CEOs who are clear nazi sympathizers are victims… that’s not a serious viewpoint.
This refers to the no-logs policy.
IVPN has improved considerably and continues to do so.
Referring to Andy Yen as a Nazi sympathizer is beyond hyperbole and enters right into slander.
He said a stupid thing clumsily, but he is not a fascist. The company he founded is a powerful tool to oppose authoritarian governments.
This purity testing and hyper-partisanship has made online discourse nearly useless.
You can - and absolutely should - support companies that champion your values. Part of being in this bubble is being able to make conscious decisions to support more ethical businesses. Plenty of digital ink can be spilled as to whether that’s a feature or a bug of the online privacy movement.
According to this thread and the general vibe of those on Reddit, quite a lot of people support “remigrating” or “repatriating” Sandra, a 13 year old Swedish child who was born in Sweden and raised Swedish. I fear that words like “remigration” and “monoculturalism” are merely PR spin on pure hatred.
The fact that Daniel is still involved in the company leads me to believe some portion of my subscription fees has gone into the pocket of the Örebro party and (what I find to be) their hateful rhetoric. I hope we don’t forget the policies of Germany in 1938.
I have been looking at IVPN because of its recommendation by PG but I am slightly hesitant as I would like to support EU businesses where possible. Maybe we’ll see new companies looking to fill that gap, and/or perhaps the PG recommendations get expanded in the future.
Reminder to everyone to adhere to our Guidelines - Privacy Guides Community
If this discussion does not continue in a civilised manner it will be closed.
To give an update on the technical side: I just bought a 1 month subscription of IVPN and will report back how it compares to Mullvad. Thanks so far for the useful answers.
Edit: my main motive against Proton was the non-availability of anonymous payment btw.
IVPN is great, and Mullvad is still one of the best VPNs out there, no matter what some Swedish communist newspaper has to say.
I wanted to try IVPN just because Mullvad is so popular, but I like Mullvad browser and Mullvad truly has a perfect track record afaik. Just look at how fast they responded to that fingerprinting attack when the researcher didn’t do responsible disclosure.
A cool feature of IVPN is it will disable if you connect on your home network with it running, which would be convenient and save bandwidth for me.
The Mullvad android app is perfect afaict and highly reliable, but once my year subscription runs out I will try a month of IVPN.
I’ll be up front in saying that infrastructure improvements have taken a back seat due to our pricing restructuring and launch of new services this past year. We are in the process of expanding our infra staff for this reason, and continuing with RAM-only rollout will be the primary focus when that’s done.
Regarding locations, server count and bandwidth (eg. 10 Gbps servers), please let us know what is missing or could be improved based on your day-to-day needs and experience, and we’ll do our best to expand where necessary. We don’t believe in adding new servers and increasing bw. for optics or just to match competitors on paper, but we do want to provide ample capacity so users get the experience they expect.