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
That moment when you literally sent Mullvad a bunch of cash like two weeks before all of this came down and you know there’s literally no way to get your money back and it takes 2-4 weeks for money to get from your country to Sweden so you haven’t even started using the service.
They’ve claimed they’ll honor refunds,fwiw:
https://mastodon.online/@mullvadnet/116822246786533774
That doesn’t help the cash in an envelope with no return address crowd. Mullvad also doesn’t have any way to associate an account with a person.
The people who pay with cash in an envelope should know that doing so is a risk with its own potential issues. A risk that they accept by paying with cash in an envelope like a seedy mofo. It’s a choice.
So then their offer may not be genuine…bummer.
They refunded me the same day I requested the refund without issue, their refund offer is genuine.
It’s less of an ingenuine offer issue and more of a “there’s a way to pay thats anonymous and untraceable” problem.
There’s no way to privately and anonymously confirm that the person who paid cash and is asking for a refund is who they say they are. If you have them do that then now you have a record of who they are and that can be used by the cops when they cleverly hit you with a subpoena the month after your big scandal broke.
So if you’re committed to protecting customers privacy you can’t do refunds on cash.
Understood. I was replying more to the general inability for them to associate people with accounts,if I read you right.
Oh they can do cc and PayPal refunds. Probably monero and bitcoin too. Wire transfers you can’t usually reverse, cash you can’t either. Cooperative merchants can refund a wire transfer, but it’s not as cut and dry as the cc, PayPal or crypto process.
And it’s possible for a rep to decide a person is who they say they are and refunding the balance of an account somehow but that requires the person give up the shield of anonymity and who would do that.
That’s the whole point of paying cash. If your vpn account gets associated, just abandon it and move on. There’s no record of ongoing payment for an investigator to trace back.