Field Notes

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Daniel Berntsson

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Daniel Berntsson is a co-founder and, with Fredrik Strömberg, equal co-owner of Mullvad VPN AB in Gothenburg. He keeps a personal blog at dberntsson.info, where he describes himself as a libertarian anarchist and publishes political essays.

He is the individual at the center of the Mullvad donation controversy: in 2025 he donated five million SEK to Örebropartiet, and when the donation became public in mid-2026 he published his rationale the same day Mullvad issued its official statement.

That rationale is not a party-program endorsement. He writes that he dislikes most of ÖP’s policies, does not want the party to hold much power, and donated to encourage political competition and to reward the party for naming what he and the Markus och Malcom podcast circle call the “transferiat” — groups he sees as living off tax extraction. Mullvad’s statement stresses that the donation was private and that the founders “have always been in strong disagreement on important issues, including this one.”

For the vault’s purposes the relevant fact is structural rather than biographical: a privacy company owned 50/50 by two individuals cannot fully insulate its brand from what one owner does with distributed profits, which is the lesson drawn in Mullvad donation controversy and Privacy trust and governance.

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