Good question! I guess it does matter that he's a cofounder and CEO. I honestly don't know how I would react if we were talking about an employee instead. I'd deliberate and make up my mind there and then. Which sheds light on the fact that the matter isn't as black and white as my comment made it sound.

wat

My point was that their user base is more technologically adept than other businesses, and therefore it matters more for them. Also their selling point is that you "trust" them not to give your info away, and anything that makes them seem untrustworthy is bound to hurt their business. So they're not really comparable to regular businesses when it comes to that.

And he called himself an anarchist when he's a textbook example of social darwinist, Armstrong type even. My anarchist brothers and sisters, when will you step up to not let them take the brand and banners of your hands?

Not even that. They straight up endorse capitalism over public work.

It's like national liberal socialism

It's a (butchered) joke from Peep Show, but I feel it captures the gist of the statement linked to by OP

If you want something European, I'd throw AirVPN in the mix. I went there and never to Mullvad. And now I'm glad I didn't and at the same time I'm looking forward to hearing inevitably what corpses my current provider has in the cupboard.

I dislike Proton, which I quit after the CEO praised 47 on his big tech regulation and before they handed the email account of some environmental activist over to the authorities, in France IIRC. They want to be your replacement for Google and keep pushing more services at obscure subscription levels at you. In terms of VPN, they were good though.

iVPN

The Hated One has a video explaining his take on what Mullvad has done, and he gives 2 good alternatives to Mullvad. He also has other videos comparing VPN services in terms of privacy. He's very thorough.

There isn’t one with feature or operations parity and a similar history of success.

If you are actually concerned for your safety or legal status or something then I wouldn’t switch from them.

If you’re trying to accomplish something else there are good alternatives. Air for example is a great piracy vpn but I wouldn’t trust it for my own safety.

Windscribe

But societies need a great diversity of ideas, initiatives and organizations who can be tested and sifted until the best ones remain.

need? At what point does a society NEED to test racism to see if it should remain?

When will these societies decide that they tested it long enough?

Thx for the suggestion, I have seen this, the hated one is my only good source on this topic, but more than one source would be nice.

The anarchist story was one of those which sounded almost to good to be true in my ears

My Mullvad sub ended very shortly after this news broke. I paid for nym but the connection on my Android would constantly disconnect and reconnect. On my Linux PC the connection was much more stable but every time I started my PC I would have to restart the daemon because it would never auto start properly. I ended up getting an ivpn subscription as I have used them before and had no problems. I paid for the 2 year sub for nym using their $nym token so it was fairly cheap. I don't care too much as I want to support them and hope they can improve the experience and I may use the 5 hop mixnet occasionally.

I have used ivpn in the past, before apps, and have some accounts for its present iteration that are not tested yet.

The biggest problem I see with ivpn is how complex its offerings are and by extension how difficult it is for even a user who has passing familiarity with VPNs like myself to make good choices.

While recently it’s been made the default, the user can still opt to create a username and password that are subpoenable pii, if that’s a word. Able to be subpoenaed.

It is not immediately clear what the security surface is on their various product tiers. I won’t go into all of them but the top features a third party firewall program called portmaster that’s developed by a different vpn company called safing. Perhaps this is useful to you. I found it to be another fractal galaxy of loose ends to tease out.

The above stuff is largely the same boat proton is in. You can set up a simple vpn account. Will you? They would love to give you a good deal on a big bundle…

Mullvad avoids this with a single product offering, no additional attack surface (except for their now ubiquitous version of the vpn app) and no way for the user to put them in a situation where they ever even have your information.

What remains to be seen is real strongly investigated results of a legal action against ivpn. Those legal actions have happened but they’ve largely been what get called “fishing trips” by exhausted public defenders in procedural dramas. There hasn’t been anything on the scale of what’s been pointed at mullvad and with the Byzantine stuff on offer by ivpn in comparison to mullvad it would be a real hoot to dig through that disclosure if and when it comes along.

It may behove you, as it once behove me (is it really spelled the same in past and future perfect tenses, like a read/read situation?) to disregard guides or recommendations and instead look into the information directly and draw your own conclusions.

For example: Often times, a guide or recommendation is formatted as a spreadsheet and the best option is the one that accumulates the most check marks across its row. That type of decision making system would give an advantage to services that support the use of the openvpn protocol since it’s one more check than those that don’t. Except for the common modern use case of openvpn is embedded edge devices like routers that may not support safe openvpn configurations.

So presence of footgun is a plus in many systems used to recommend VPNs and that’s just a simple example.

Everyone’s different and everyone’s needs are different.

I don't see in the page linked where do they provide a free VPN service.