> I feel like the default assumption for a company in the privacy space is that they are close to politically neutral (0).
That assumption here is wrong, because VPN companies in particular are known to be a lot dodgier than average. Maybe if we were talking bakeries, then I'd agree.
> Also also, saying that Proton’s founder is “outwardly MAGA” is really oversimplifying things. I’m not sure what your viewpoint actually is — maybe you’re just expressing someone else’s — but I’d encourage you to read: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
One can make very similar arguments for this specific case. Saying that the party in question is far-right is simplifying things. On top of that, a co-founder making a private donation to a party (two layers: 1. private 2. party) is less directly related to the company than a founder directly tweeting an ideological point (1. public 2. direct).
Honestly, the party sounds insane, I wouldn't be caught dead supporting them and would hope that any Swede reading alone avoids them with a ten-foot pole. But the response in this comment section is absurdly exaggerated compared to what any of the Big Tech corps that get talked about daily on here, and whose
I don't believe it's organic at all. Recently there's the biggest push in history of "think of the children" online surveillance, with remote attestation and mandatory identity coupling being rolled out at scale. Mullvad is known to be one of the top privacy-preserving VPN providers in the West, with a large userbase on HN, and now you get this very disproportionately negative reaction to what is realistically a meaningless issue: "$0.01 of every $1 spent on Mullvad might end up with someone who donates to a radical party, if even that" - just like, almost certainly, every other $1 you spend elsewhere does.
That assumption here is wrong, because VPN companies in particular are known to be a lot dodgier than average. Maybe if we were talking bakeries, then I'd agree.
> Also also, saying that Proton’s founder is “outwardly MAGA” is really oversimplifying things. I’m not sure what your viewpoint actually is — maybe you’re just expressing someone else’s — but I’d encourage you to read: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...
One can make very similar arguments for this specific case. Saying that the party in question is far-right is simplifying things. On top of that, a co-founder making a private donation to a party (two layers: 1. private 2. party) is less directly related to the company than a founder directly tweeting an ideological point (1. public 2. direct).
Honestly, the party sounds insane, I wouldn't be caught dead supporting them and would hope that any Swede reading alone avoids them with a ten-foot pole. But the response in this comment section is absurdly exaggerated compared to what any of the Big Tech corps that get talked about daily on here, and whose
I don't believe it's organic at all. Recently there's the biggest push in history of "think of the children" online surveillance, with remote attestation and mandatory identity coupling being rolled out at scale. Mullvad is known to be one of the top privacy-preserving VPN providers in the West, with a large userbase on HN, and now you get this very disproportionately negative reaction to what is realistically a meaningless issue: "$0.01 of every $1 spent on Mullvad might end up with someone who donates to a radical party, if even that" - just like, almost certainly, every other $1 you spend elsewhere does.