Until recently, if you had asked my opinion for the best VPN provider, I wouldn’t have hesitated to recommend Mullvad. I have been a customer for several years and have found their service essentially flawless, and their apps well-designed and functional. I also like that the code they produce is open source, and that they have undergone several audits.
But then it came to light that one of the founders of the company, Daniel Berntsson, spent 5 million SEK to single-handedly keep an anti-immigrant and fascist party in Sweden afloat. A non-negligible amount of every subscription fee you send goes to directly fund fascism.
So of course I did what any sensible person would do: I found a viable alternative, took the effort to switch, and then requested a refund from Mullvad for the ~5 months or so I had already paid in advance. To their credit, they responded quickly and didn’t hesitate to refund me the unused portion of my subscription.
I dragged my feet a bit in finding an alternative. As I said, I rely heavily on a VPN, and finding one that worked as well as Mullvad felt like it would be a monumental challenge (by which I mean, a tremendous pain in the hole). Most of the well-known VPN providers are likewise problematic.
I eventually landed on IVPN, and to their credit, I am shocked at how smooth the transition has been. Their account creation process works the same as Mullvad: generate an account without providing any email address, username, or identifying information, and then pay using a method that suits your comfort level / needs / threat model.
The app installation was quick and painless (adding a repo in Fedora and then dnf installing), and setup was likewise simple. It uses Wireguard as any VPN worth is salt should, and handles all that configuration in the background. Plus, the app provides advanced options like kill switches, tracker blocking, and multi-hop routing.
I thought the switch would be a gigantic pain in the ass, but I was actually up and running with IVPN in under 10 minutes.
There are a few things I either haven’t fully tested yet, or have found to be lacking. The list of servers is dramatically smaller than Mullvad. Fewer locations, and fewer servers within each location. That doesn’t really matter to me, but if having access to loads of servers in different places is important to you, this may not be an ideal solution.
Anecdotally, I also feel like browsing the web is slower, but I have low pings and high speeds, so I think it’s probably just me being paranoid and looking for something to be different.
In any case, switching away from Mullvad to IVPN was necessary, and has been relatively low-friction.
As it happens, right before hitting “publish” on this blog post, Mullvad released a blog post addressing this donation, which was mealy-mouthed and shameful.. In it, they say “It should be clear by now how the party donation relates to this. Mullvad does not condone it, nor condemn it. It most likely was a bad idea; most things where there are a multitude of conflicting opinions necessarily are.” I encourage you to read it for yourself.
I’m still angry about how the news about Mullvad caught me off guard. Before now, I would have listed them among the handful of companies and organizations that are actively doing good in the world. No more, clearly.
“Don’t let the bastards get you down” sounds like sage advice, until you realize just how few non-bastards there are. I suppose the only thing you can really do is make the best judgment calls possible with the available information, and adjust appropriately as new information becomes available.