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"'I don’t like that he made this donation' — Mullvad CEO reacts to co-founder’s donation to controversial Swedish populist party" (www.techradar.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 253 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (71 children)

Mullvad co-CEO Fredrik Strömberg confirmed that neither Mullvad VPN AB, its parent company Amagicom AB, nor its sister company Tillitis AB played any role in supporting the political party.

It doesn't matter if the company itself was directly involved or not, the money came from the company, and from its' customers.

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  • [–] 146 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (52 children)

    yeah it's like saying Elon is only a piece of shit on his free time so it's okay

    edit: piss of shit

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  • [–] [S] 69 points 4 months ago (51 children)

    I'm not taking side here, but to be fair, Elon Musk is a shitty person doing shitty things both professionally and private. Mullvad VPN is at least only doing good things!

    With that said. I have stopped using Mullvad VPN for now. We'll see how this all plays out.

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  • [–] 47 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (21 children)

    gonna get downvoted to hell here but making EVs and charging infrastructure is a good thing. also rooftop solar and batteries.

    still, fuck nazi elon.

    edit: this isn’t even about “credit” for developing the tech or whatever. even if we all agree this stuff was going to happen with or without elon, the Tesla business is still putting these products on the market. That is good, just like Mullvad and VPN. They didn’t invent VPN or anything, they are just one (good) provider.

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  • [–] [S] 45 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    The only issue with Tesla is that the quality of their cars is mediocre at best, while you're paying premium, and that Tesla is the most childish and obstinate company to work with.

    We have something called Råd & Rön's Blacklist, which is respected Swedish consumer magazine's list of products to avoid. Tesla is one of the brands that's listed there. Partly because of the poor quality of the cars and partly because they don't follow the rulings from the National Board for Consumer Complaints here in Sweden.

    And they don't give a **** about insurance companies either. If something happens to your Tesla, you're on your own buying a new one yourself. You can forget about getting any sort of help from Tesla.

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  • [–] [S] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.

    I guess everything is relative. Tesla is still a crappy car in terms of quality here, with tons of unresolved issues with faulty cars that Tesla refused to help their customers with.

    I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow?

    Råd & Rönis is an independent, non-profit consumer magazine owned by the Swedish Consumer Agency. Their funding comes from subscriptions and government grants (no advertising and no corporate money). They test products, expose bad companies and protect consumers. Their "Black List" (Svarta Listan) is highly influential, and being on it can destroy sales completely.

    Customers can file a complaint at The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN), a government-run arbitration(?) service. Their decisions are not legally binding, but companies that ignore them get publicly shamed (and often blacklisted by Råd & Rön). Tesla has ignored basically every single case. Any remotely serious company here in Sweden comply with ARN. We take ARN very seriously here.

    What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla?

    Our law is equal for everyone. We don't care if you're some local dude selling hotdogs or Elon Musk selling Teslas.

    I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well [...]

    That's the issue. Their warranty basically means that they ignore you and will fuck you over, even if the issue is their own fault. People have ended up with repair costs close to what a new car costs, and even if it's Teslas fault, they refuse to do shit.

    [...] and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.

    Of course they have to, if the issue is their own fault.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 4 months ago

    I'm glad you have a better experience with them! :)

    Here's some reading (in Swedish) if you would like to read about it:

    I didn't have to look hard to find these. :/

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Rooftop solar is definitely not something Musk can take any credit for.

    EVs maybe, but charging infrastructure that he made proprietary rather than using the open standard is not especially worthy of praise.

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  • [+] 28 points 4 months ago (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I mean yeah, obviously. But Musk is very obviously excellent at marketing, and there's an argument to be made that it was thanks to his marketing that Tesla became as popular as it did, and that that helped pull up the EV market more broadly.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Not even EVs. The work was getting done by researchers improving electric motors and batteries. As soon as the technology was viable Elon jumped on it and marketed himself as the person behind it all. Same goes for PayPal which he stole credit for, rockets that people already worked decades on, tunnels that are just bad metros, and machine learning (AI) that people were already doing since the 70's and only recently had breakthroughs because of the increased ability to feed it data en masse.

    The only credit he should get is having the power and charisma to capitalize on the work of others. He's a Thomas Edison and not a Nikola Tesla.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company's achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk's "help".

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    He didnt make shit. He saw there was opportunity and ran with it, now that he has it sustainabikity is nowhere close to his goals.

    The solar tiles suck The battery is a whitelabelled product The boring company was strategic interference to stop public infrastructure development.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Elon is just a propaganda machine (see his "in 4 or 5 years we'll have datacenters in space" bullshit, or all the other things that he promised but it didn't happen), a shame so many people fall for it.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 4 months ago (26 children)

    They are? How?

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  • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (18 children)

    Monero is anonymous, so it makes sense.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Do you have a better way of making anonymous digital payments?

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I don't know if you are serious, but the idea that people have nothing to hide comes from Nazi Germany. Also, lgbtq+ people may need to hide from their family without being cut from communities, just to give an example.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    For a philosophical or political idea, I think yes, the source matter. The dispariton of the state ain't the same between an anarchist and a nazi (they were, too), because it will have an impact on the mean you want to do it.

    But your family accepted you, how about some transphobic parents for their kid, how would this play out in your book? Cut off from any support? Beatten up to shit because they looked at wiki trans? Sure, the more open the better,but right now this is not the situation.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    with all the downsides of crypto.

    Such as what in this case? Definitely not power consumption if we're talking about Monero.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (6 children)

    How does that apply to someone using it to pay for VPN service? Who cares what other people are using it for.

    Also, many of those "criminals" are using it to buy shit like HRT because they can't get it where they live. Some others just want to get cheap cannabis gummies in states where it's already legal.

    You shouldn't paint with such a broad brush.

    USD is just as private, unless you're tracking serial numbers on bills, and even then... It would be like saying you don't use cash because it's used by criminals. Makes no sense.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    If buying HRT and using it is illegal where you live, don't do that, even using monero or other closed (closeness is the oposite of openness and is more neutral term than privacy) money.

    Imagine living in 2026 and thinking that legality = morality.

    I wonder if you'd have said the same thing if I said people were using it to buy insulin.

    Thinking it's ok to deny people the medication that they need because they need to use a privacy coin to buy it? Nice.

    I'm just going to skip over the part where you call people criminals for being concerned about privacy. Ostensibly that means you're against VPNs in general then, right? Want to try to defend that one?

    Boot licking loser.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    It's a good idea when the alternative is that person ending their life.

    Monero is used almost exclusively by criminals and privacy focused people, who are probably criminals too.

    Your words.

    And again, what if it was for insulin instead?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    because the buyer pays transaction fees and there is no risk of chargeback so their costs are inherently lower if you pay that way?

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  • [–] 96 points 4 months ago*

    You have that backwards. Customers of a company get to decide whether or not they want to give that company their money for any reason they fucking please

    I'd also argue that no one would care if this were some mid-level manager making a donation. This is the owner of a company, not "staff."

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  • [–] 32 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Legally? No.

    Morally? Yes. Customers give their say as to whether or not they want to give their money to some specific company every single time they engage in a business transaction. There is also nothing wrong with telling others to make the same consideration.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?

    I'm allowed to do business or not do business with any company for any reason I like. Cofounder funding a political party with one of their goals being to brutalize immigrants? No thanks. Contractor wearing a company shirt was rude to me on the elevator? I'll check the competition. Maybe I just don't like the color of their logo?

    I'm allowed to define my morals and what I would consider violating those morals would be with monetary support and no half baked slippery slope argument is going to change that.

    What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    The co-founder publicly stated he made the donation on social media. What made him obliged to disclose this? He seems rather proud of it, in fact.

    As a result, people feel they may have a moral obligation to not funnel money to him. Your stance also doesn;t really line up with your examples like

    Or say your customer base for any reason is in large part Vegan, should you tell your employee's to stop buying meat? Should they stop taking money from the non-vegan customers? How is anyone going to navigate this?

    You don't mention the specific problem you have with this, which would be mandated disclosure. By your own words, this is perfectly fine since people can chose the reasons "Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously." to not do business with someone so I'm not sure why it's a slippery slope to you.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    No. I'm just of the opinion that I'm in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

    That's not what you said though. I don't think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it's perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.

    Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it's entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago*

    I'm just of the opinion that I'm in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.

    ...

    So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?

    Can you see how these two statements are not the same thing? The former is not something anyone had said until you did so while the latter is what the entire rest of this conversation has been about until you tried to pivot to the former.

    Indirectly yes a customer absolutely has a say in what an employee spends money on if they are aware of it because it's the customer's money that's indirectly paying for the thing. An employee is a part of a business and when an employee engages in some activity even on their own time if people are aware they work for that company, then that reflects on the company and vice versa. That's one of the reasons companies have very strict rules about representing yourself as an employee or agent of the company.

    Furthermore the higher an employee's position in a company the stronger their actions reflect on the company. For someone like a co-founder, practically the highest position in a company, those actions reflect very strongly on the company. The only actions that reflect stronger are ones done directly by the company itself.

    This is why HR departments exist, they protect the business from the actions of its employees (or at least attempt to).

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    A commonly known US analog is the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain. They are proudly Christian and got tons of flak for donating to “traditional family” organizations that spread gay hate and so on.

    They stopped, but the owner still personally donates. So every dollar you spend there still fuels those hate groups. It just takes a slightly different path.

    So the question isn’t “is the company bad,” it’s “what is your money funding?”

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