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Comment by kfreds | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I can relate. I initially had mixed feelings about it as well.

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. :)

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Thank you for sharing that! I am definitely part of the HN group think that tends to be irked by mass marketing- mainly because of baggage from the past of false advertising. However, I do agree that getting the non-IT geek's attention is what would actually move the needle for political action. I was amused (mostly surprised) to see a billboard while driving down the 110 in LA. More importantly, it led to a cool discussion with my non-tech wife who now appreciates your guys' brand more. :)

As frustrating as it is, even great products don't sell themselves. I find much, if not most marketing for subscription-based services pretty scummy, but it's not like it has to be, and I'd much rather see physical ads than how most stuff gets surreptitiously slipped into my surveillance-capitalism-sponsored life.

> plastering privacy propaganda all over some major U.S. cities

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?

Thanks! I don't think so unfortunately. It's a great idea though.

Since there's no existing compendium, maybe a social media contest for people submitting photos of anonymized objects (e.g. in a box), books (hardback with custom cover), humans (costume/mask/etc) with Mullvad ads / billboard in the background. Crowdsource field reporting and motivate discussion about metadata in online and offline privacy.

Okay, this comment was the comment that got me sold on Mullvad. I was looking for a VPN I liked anyway and if you also use your business entity to help drive legislation toward a more privacy focused end, I'm in.

For me, (one of) the moments was when there figured out how to do remote attestation of the server to check that what it was running was what you expected, so you could check its privacy yourself.

Rather a neat subversion of the common corporate use of remote attestation, to preserve user privacy and security rather than curtail it.

Thank you! You are of course referring to System Transparency. I feel obligated to point out that we have yet to fully implement that idea. I've been working on it, and the related projects Sigsum and Tillitis, for the past six years. There have been lots of detours, but we are making progress towards the vision outlined in the blog post I wrote in 2019: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/system-transparency-future

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)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Thank you for the service that you and the rest of the team provide. I've found it to be excellent, and you're one of only a very slim number of transparent VPN providers who seem to be in it for the right reasons.

How did you measure the effectiveness of physical ads to issues and other key metrics? I’m just curious what it takes to measure those as it’s always been mysterious to me. It seems like it needs to include a coupon code or something? Also interesting re: legislation. How so?

To my knowledge we don't measure it, at least not in the way I think you mean.

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.

thank you for offering up in this forum at least your own personal contributions to your organization's position on its advertising campaigns. not sure if any official statements on the matter have been made elsewhere, but you've assuaged at least my own slight concern about it with this one. truly. (and by 'truly' i mean i've been meaning to stuff some cash in an envelope addressed to you guys!)

transparency is absolutely a corporate virtue.

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