https://mullvad.net/en/help/policy-reviews-advertising-and-a...
This can be instantly disproved by examining the cases where valid warrants were presented to them by LEAs and they were unable to provide any user data.
Even if a three-letter agency intercepted your package and swapped your gift card with a known code, I believe Mullvad is not recording the connection between specific gift code and the account number.
You can also exchange unscratched gift cards with friends and strangers.
1. We launched Mullvad 15 years ago. During those 15 years people's interest and awareness of online security and privacy has grown considerably, as has the consumer VPN market.
2. Our strategy is quite different from most of our competitors'. As a result we've grown slower than several of them, but we have nevertheless continued to grow year after year.
3. The costs of the campaign are perhaps lower than you assume.
tl;dr We've slowly grown over many years and are now making enough money to plaster privacy propaganda over your city. Hopefully it's an interesting change from the usual bus ads. Enjoy!
On the other hand the campaign we did in Stockholm last year worked out quite well. It managed to affect both domestic and EU legislative discussions at the time. Or at least our campaign contributed to moving the discussion in the right direction.
How much is that worth? I'm not sure, but the reason we started Mullvad in the first place was to conduct political action through entrepreneurship, specifically regarding mass surveillance and censorship.
If nothing else it seems to amuse a lot of people, including me and my colleagues. When I first heard of the idea of plastering privacy propaganda all over some major U.S. cities my initial reaction was more or less "lol, we can just do that?". As it turns out we can. :)
The ads are great to see in NYC subway and giant billboard near NY Times HQ.
Is there an online page with all of the ads? Maybe a video tour of the ads "in the wild" in different cities?
Rather a neat subversion of the common corporate use of remote attestation, to preserve user privacy and security rather than curtail it.
Two years ago we moved the OSS projects System Transparency and Sigsum to its own organization: Glasklar Teknik AB (glasklarteknik.se).
The OSS and OSHW project TKey was moved to Mullvad's other sister company Tillitis AB (tillitis.se)
I can't speak for my marketing colleagues but I would assume they reason about it. It seems like a complex system to me, which means the approach kind of has to be (1) forming an understanding of the system and (2) deciding whether one is comfortable with the uncertainty.
One aspect that makes the cost/benefit assessment quite a bit easier is that we don't only care about how many new paying customers we get. It's also fun to do this kind of advertisement. How many interesting conversations about privacy have been had as a result of people seeing our billboards? That's worth something too.
transparency is absolutely a corporate virtue.
(Seeing the reply down thread from a Mullvad rep, this is not unexpected)
> Imagine an ad that won’t track you after you see it
> Mullvad VPN
That’s not what a VPN does though. Tunneling my browsing does not stop sites from serving ads, setting cookies, fingerprinting browsers, etc.
Mullvad itself is extremely clear that use of a VPN alone is not enough for the reasons you stated. Mullvad VPN (which is what they advertised) is a suite of products and services, some of which are:
- DNS services (ads, tracking)
- A privacy-optimized browser (cookies, fingerprinting)
- Network services like multihop routing (many benefits such as resistance to timing attacks)
All of these services are included with your subscription at no additional cost. I feel like the claim of preventing ad tracking is as legitimate as it could possibly be.