I don't know the context of that quote, but no, that doesn't sound empathetic at all.
2,639 karma · joined June 16, 2012
Obsessed with building more trustworthy systems.
You can read more about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Allard
That's an interesting angle!
> What we can do, is recognise that if someone actually takes a large material action against the company's mission, then they have gone a step further and demonstrated the conflict of interest.
As far as I understand Daniel doesn't believe his donation materially harms Mullvad's mission. I am undecided and need more information. I highly doubt he would donate if he believed it would be antithetical to Mullvad's mission, given that the company is founded on our shared values around privacy. I'll ask him.
I have several colleagues who I'm fairly certain are anarcho-syndicalists, meaning they want to abolish the state and capitalism. I don't know about my colleagues, but in general anarcho-syndicalists seek to bring about their vision through organising trade unions, and use that to seize control of the means of production and distribution. I on the other hand am clearly a capitalist pig seeking to oppress my workforce. Why else would I invite them to join me on the barricades against mass surveillance and censorship? Shared values around privacy? :P
I have no business questioning which demonstrations my colleagues participate in, or what they write on their blog. As long as they are not actively malicious against me, our workplace, or their fellow coworkers.
It's getting late, maybe I'm missing something in my description. I guess that's a rough approximation of how I feel about tolerating differences of opinion.
In this forum, yes. Unfortunately there are lots of people who don't care to inform themselves in the least. During the weekend my impression was that most people assumed Mullvad only had one founder, owner and CEO. Some people were implying that Mullvad's workforce supported this, which of course is ridiculous. I don't want to be associated with this donation. Then there are the people who think he donated 5 million USD or EUR. Sigh.
It would be nice if people didn't resort to make things up, and instead expressed their disapprovement based on fact. That's what I'm doing. As are several of my colleagues.
> The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with
Yes, that is clear.
> Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.
Ah, thanks. That was not my intent. For sure an individual's actions has consequences, especially when you're in a position of power. In this case people are holding Daniel accountable by switching providers. They are acting according to their beliefs. That's fine.
Meanwhile I am also trying to clarify Mullvad's position on the matter. Many people understand it and still disagree. That's also fine.
Thank you.
Not at all. When we say we believe privacy is a universal right, we're saying that e.g. states and corporations that actively violate your privacy are in the wrong. We're not saying that Mullvad, you or anyone else are obligated to work for free in order to provide privacy as a service.
Does that make sense?
Again, I'm not defending his choice, but no, I'm not being naive. Over the 20 years I've known him he has demonstrated his values through consistent words and actions. I'd share details but that's not my place to do. You may choose to believe me or not.
I'll admit holding the line like this, when most people don't understand the nuance, and most of those who do don't value it, is irrational from a business perspective. Then again we founded the company because of our political convictions about free speech, free press, privacy, mass surveillance and censorship.
I respect your choice to leave, and also appreciate that we're both making an effort to understand each other. I wish all disagreements were like this.
I get that you disagree with his choice, as do I. But please recognize that we've built this company together over 17 years. To suggest that you know better than me that he wants to create a monoculture at our workplace is ridiculous.
I'm not sure why you're arguing this point though. It seems we both believe he made the wrong choice?
Mullvad only concerns itself with its mission. Our customers and employees represent a wide spectrum of opinions. You may not like some of them. Regardless, Mullvad's position is that privacy is a universal right, regardless of political affiliation.
> I understand how awkward the position you're in must be
Yes. Thank you.
Daniel made this decision as a private individual. Some of his colleagues (including me) dislike it as private individuals.
I recognize that the amount as well as his position of power within the company (co-founder, co-owner, co-CEO) make people who disapprove more uncomfortable than if it had been a much lower amount from a regular employee.
However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?
Better to see Mullvad almost like a force of nature: Mullvad believes privacy is a universal right. You might disagree but at least it's consistent, and I'd argue that's one path to trustworthiness - you know how we're likely to treat you as a customer. (equally, regardless of your political affiliation)
Obviously everyone is free to make their own choice on whether they like this stance or not.
> obviously Berntsson has every right to his opinions and to express them
Indeed.
> and I also appreciate that someone can have control over an opinionated company and run it for one particular set of reasons but not for other causes that someone believes in
That is exactly the case.
> but in the end I just don't want my money supporting anti-people causes.
As is your right. Daniel made his choice and now you make yours, as a number of other people in this thread has done. Some believe this party is left-wing, others right-wing. Some approve of it, others don't. Personally I don't, and as I've said elsewhere in this thread I wish he hadn't donated. As do many of our colleagues. To be fair though, there are also colleagues who do seem to approve. And then there are those who don't seem to care either way.
Still, I'm glad you recognize the possibility that Daniel and I are able to keep our personal opinions separate from the mission of our company. This is something we live in our daily work as well. As a workplace I'm glad we're not a monoculture of 100% like-minded individuals.
To answer your question, we started building this organization in the summer of 2008 for idealistic reasons, and we are still idealists who think privacy is fundamental to a civilized society.
The best strategy for achieving societal impact through entrepreneurship is consistent, long-term, and value-based ownership. For us, this disqualifies taking outside investment, either through venture capital or going public. Mullvad has instead been growing organically without outside investments.
Our principles have withstood the test of time. Our conviction has remained unchanged through multiple serious offers of acquisition and outside investment. Words are cheap of course, but consistent action over the course of almost two decades is not.
Mullvad is about privacy. Neither Daniel nor I have used Mullvad's brand to promote our personal opinions.
As I said in another comment, speaking for myself, I don’t like that he made this donation and I know this view is shared by many of my colleagues.
I cannot speak for Daniel. I know there are some policies he likes and there are things he doesn’t like. Personally I am not a fan.
This morning Daniel explained his rationale to most of the company. Speaking for myself, I don’t like that he made this donation and I know this view is shared by many of my colleagues. Speaking as the co-CEO of Mullvad, we will continue to protect the universal right to privacy. People should feel safe using Mullvad regardless of their political affiliation.
Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I've seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns you're welcome to comment on this thread, or email our customer support.
See below for the response you'll get from support:
-----
Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.
Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don't agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don't agree with.
We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.
This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.
The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.
It should be obvious that Daniel's private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad's values or mission, in the same way that someone's opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn't.
That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it's important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.
As for our support team they are responsive and experienced. Several of them have worked with us for many years and do offensive security research in their free time.
Unlike many organisations we don't see customer support as a cost center, just like we don't see security as a cost center. Our support team represent our customers, and as a consequence contribute a lot to how we prioritise our roadmap.
Edit: In hindsight I regret making this comment. It was unnecessary, but removing it now would look weird.
Some aspects of the described behavior are as we intended and some are not. The cause is not exactly as described in the blog post. As for mitigation, we are already testing a patch of the unintended behavior on a subset of our infrastructure. If any of you try to reproduce the blog post's findings you may get confusing results throughout the day.
We will also re-evaluate whether the intended behaviors are acceptable or not. Some of this is a trade-off between multiple aspects of privacy, and multiple aspects of user experience.
Please note that this is my current understanding, which may change. I was only made aware of this an hour ago, and most of that time was spent talking with Ops, considering what to do immediately, and writing this post.
Finally, for those of you who do security research: when you find a security or privacy issue, please consider notifying the maintainer/vendor before publishing your findings, even if you intend to publish right away.
Three years ago I had no idea how the Go runtime worked, but I very much wanted to learn more. I’m not a software engineer in the conventional sense, so reading the Go source was not a realistic option.
Jesus talks and articles inspired me to learn more. Today I feel comfortable with all stages of the general compiler pipeline. In the past few months I have studied the calculi of the lambda cube, Martin-Lof type theory, Horn-clause-based instruction selection, algorithms for register allocation, Milner’s CCS vs pi-calculus, which structures in compilers and kernels map to digraphs, and so on.
Jesus talks are an excellent onboarding ramp.
Then we discovered snapshot.debian.org wasn't feeling well, so that was another (important) detour.
Part of me wish we had focused more on getting System Transparency in its entirety in production at Mullvad. On the other hand I certainly don't regret us creating Tillitis TKey, Sigsum, taking care of Debian Snapshot service, and several other things.
Now, six years later, systemd and other projects have gotten a long way to building several of the things we need for ST. It doesn't make sense to do double work, so I want to seize the moment and make sure we coordinate.
As I mentioned above, we've followed systemd's development in recent years with great interest, as well as that of some other projects. When I started(*) the System Transparency project it was very much a research project.
Today, almost seven years later, I think there's a great opportunity for us to reduce our maintenance burden by re-architecting on top of systemd, and some other things. That way we can focus on other things. There's still a lot of work to do on standardizing transparency building blocks, the witness ecosystem(**), and building an authentication mechanism for system transparency that weaves it all together.
I'm more than happy to share my notes with you. Best case you build exactly what we want. Then we don't have to do it. :)
2. Are you looking for pilot customers?