Field Notes

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Mullvad VPN Did A Complete F*CK-UP

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A roughly 13-minute video by the privacy commentator The Hated One, published 2026-07-15, responding to the Mullvad donation controversy. It is the harshest of the imported commentaries and the source of the surveillance-enforcement argument against the donation. Saved copy: timestamped transcript. The creator notes that Mullvad did not respond to his request for comment.

Position and main claims

The video argues that large private political donations are a form of two-way corruption, and that the recipient party makes this case worse: Örebropartiet campaigns on large-scale “remigration,” and enforcing such a policy would require a mass-surveillance dragnet over everyone in Sweden — residents, travelers, and citizens alike — making the donation incompatible with the privacy values Mullvad sells [02:56].

It rejects Mullvad’s private-donation framing as “a distinction without a difference”: Daniel Berntsson is an equal 50% co-owner, so the donated fortune derives from Mullvad subscribers’ payments [04:52].

The video then turns to technology, arguing Mullvad has under-invested its large margins relative to modern surveillance threats: it still gives each user a trackable exit-node identity, it remains a centralized provider whose servers could be compelled or compromised, and it has not adopted per-destination circuit designs (Safing SPN) or decentralized mixnet architectures (Nym) [06:11].

It closes by recommending alternatives — Nym, Safing/IVPN, and Tor — and addresses Mullvad’s owners directly, saying they “have lost my trust and of many others, too” [12:58].

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