Last week, the Swedish left-wing journal Flamman reported that Daniel Berntsson, co-founder of the privacy-focused VPN service Mullvad, had personally donated 5 million Swedish kronor — roughly €450,000 — to Örebropartiet, a far-right populist party now pushing to go nationwide. The donation amounts to more than 70% of the party’s funding. Berntsson confirmed it by email: “It’s a personal donation from me.” His co-founder and co-CEO Fredrik Strömberg scrambled to distance the company, telling TechRadar, “I don’t like that he made this donation.”

Cue the subscription cancellations. Privacy forums lit up with users declaring they’d take their business elsewhere, as if the VPN protocol itself had been tainted.

The reaction is understandable. It is also a category error — one that exposes a tension the privacy movement has resolutely refused to examine.

Privacy Has No Politics, and That Was Always the Pitch

Mullvad’s marketing has never been subtle. The company doesn’t require an email address to sign up. You can pay with cash mailed in an envelope. Their warrant canary is updated religiously. The entire product is built on a single premise: nobody should be able to watch what you do online, period.

Not “nobody should be able to watch what you do online, provided we approve of your politics.” The architecture does not discriminate. It cannot. A VPN tunnel does not inspect the contents of your traffic and route it through an ideological filter. The promise is universal coverage — which means, by definition, universal clientele.

That was always the deal. Privacy advocates spent two decades arguing that encryption is not a tool for criminals, that metadata collection is mass surveillance regardless of who’s being watched, that rights are indivisible. The Electronic Frontier Foundation defended the speech rights of Nazis in the 1990s on precisely these grounds. The ACLU represented the Klan. The principle was clear: if the tool requires a political litmus test, it is not a privacy tool. It is a gate.

And yet a sizable portion of the privacy community — particularly the segment that treats VPN subscriptions as identity markers — seems genuinely shocked that the people who build these tools might hold political views they find repellent.

The Donor Is Not the Product

Let’s be precise about what happened. Berntsson made a personal donation from personal funds. He did not route Mullvad corporate money to Örebropartiet. Strömberg, the other co-owner, publicly condemned it. The company’s stance is clear: this donation “is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.”

What is the argument for canceling your subscription? That by paying Mullvad €5 a month, you are indirectly enriching a co-owner who might spend his dividends on causes you dislike? By that standard, you cannot buy anything from any privately held company whose owners’ politics you have not thoroughly vetted. Good luck with your grocery shopping.

The privacy tool itself does not become complicit. The encryption does not care. The no-logging policy does not suddenly start logging because one founder wrote a check to a party that makes you angry. If anything, the speed with which Strömberg distanced the company demonstrates that the corporate entity and the individual are, in this case, actually separate — a distinction the internet routinely claims to understand and then ignores when outrage is more satisfying.

“I’m on the trading desk watching the EUR/SEK flash and some guy on a privacy forum is rage-canceling his VPN because a Swede he’s never met voted wrong,” one currency trader messaged me Monday morning, not entirely sympathetic to the cause. “The market doesn’t care about your ethical alignment. Maybe your threat model shouldn’t either.”

The Uncomfortable Symmetry

The deeper discomfort here is not about Mullvad. It is about what this episode reveals about the privacy movement’s unspoken assumptions.

For years, the marketing pitch has been that privacy is for dissidents, journalists, whistleblowers — the virtuous vulnerable. And it is. But it is also for tax evaders, conspiracy theorists, abusive spouses covering their tracks, and far-right politicians who want their internal communications encrypted. The tool does not distinguish. The principle does not distinguish.

If you believe in universal privacy — really believe in it, as a matter of rights rather than convenience — then you have already accepted that the people you despise will use the same tools you use, built by people who may share views you find abhorrent. That is the cost of a principle that does not come with a means test.

You can reject that principle. You can decide that privacy should be conditional, that some people should be watched and others should not, that the architecture should include a back door with a political bouncer at the entrance. Plenty of governments would love that outcome. But you cannot have it both ways — universal privacy when it suits your tribe, and selective exposure when it doesn’t.

Mullvad’s co-founder made a donation to a party many find repugnant. The company’s other co-founder disavowed it. The VPN still works. The threat model hasn’t changed. What has changed is the illusion that the people building privacy tools share your politics. That illusion was never part of the service agreement.

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