cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8915892
(original article in Swedish that reported this)
Posting this because I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.
The party claims to stand for a “class-conscious populism” which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the “productive” classes of society against the “Transferiat”, with the “Transferiat” being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work “made-up services”[…]
The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that “live off transfers”, as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.
Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)
Even if you’re comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.
I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it’s not great
They hand over data to the authorities like it’s candy at Halloween. They don’t really have a choice to cooperate, but the workaround is to simply not collect all that data or collect as little of it as possible so that there is nothing to hand over.
Some stuff like metadata (such as when you send the email and to whom) will always remain in cleartext, Proton has it and hands it over too. It’s a problem with email, though all chat platforms that I know of haven’t really found a way around encrypting metadata.
This also means when registering on a service you need to give them as little info about yourself as possible. Like I said, using a VPN doesn’t mean you can say whatever on the internet without repercussions. There was a case where proton handed the authorities the recovery email to the user’s proton account. (edit: meaning, keep your proton profile as separate from anything else you do as much as possible. Don’t link it to anything about yourself)
The problem with tuta is they hand over inventory data (banking info, credit card payment data etc), real-time metadata, even the entire emails, encrypted or not.
Neither tuta nor proton have fully sourced their code so people can’t audit it.
Ultimately it’s a company in the imperial core, in Germany of all places lol. Proton Mullvad and Signal have the same problem - they want privacy but they set it up right in the belly of the beast.
Email in general is just not meant to be private, it’s tech from before they even had to worry about privacy or spam.
There are more specific issues, their severity depending on how important this is to you, but:
The Edward Snowman 2016 interview brought up great points about metadata. I suggest we all take heed, although I’m pretty naked, so there’s that.
https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12045640