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Mullvad’s Co-Owner Made A Controversial Donation

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The Mullvad segment of “This Week in Privacy” episode 63 from Privacy Guides, hosted by Jonah and Nate, published 2026-07-25. Only the opening segment on the Mullvad donation controversy (roughly the first 33 minutes) was imported. Saved copy: timestamped segment transcript.

What the segment covers

Nate summarizes the reporting: Daniel Berntsson donated about five million Swedish krona to Örebropartiet, a donation made in 2025 that became public roughly a month before the episode [02:56]. Both hosts stress they are not Swedish and are unsure of the party’s exact profile; they read summaries describing it as populist, with secularist and restrictive immigration positions alongside left-wing economics [03:13].

The segment quotes the Mullvad donation controversy statement and the Berntsson Örebropartiet post, with the hosts noting that Berntsson distances himself from most of the party’s policies while still becoming its largest funder, which they find hard to follow [05:17].

Their conclusion is deliberately even-handed. Whether to keep subscribing is, in their framing, a philosophical or political judgment rather than a technical one: the service and its privacy properties are unchanged, but subscription revenue does flow to a co-owner who donates to causes a customer may oppose. They treat both staying and leaving as defensible choices [12:25].

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