Why Mullvad Stands Alone In A World Full Of Pretend Privacy
Most VPN services love to sell the fantasy of privacy. They throw ads at you, sponsor every creator on the planet, promise total anonymity, and then quietly build entire systems that depend on tracking you anyway. The problem is not limited to NordVPN. It runs across almost the entire industry, even services that market themselves as privacy saints. ProtonVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, the whole lineup. ProtonVPN, for example, was caught giving IP addresses and logs to law enforcement, showing that even VPNs marketed as “no-log” are not always trustworthy. And if anyone is tempted by Opera’s built-in VPN, stop right there. That thing is not even a VPN. It is a basic proxy that logs aggressively and belongs to a company with direct ties to China. Your data becomes a product the moment you turn it on.
Mullvad does the opposite by design. It strips the concept of a VPN down to its core purpose: protect the user, collect nothing, reveal nothing. You open the website, you click a button, and you get a random account number that is not tied to any part of your life. No email, no profile, no marketing funnel that leads you into long subscriptions. The account system is clean and anonymous in a way the rest of the industry refuses to replicate because anonymity does not serve their business model.
The infrastructure speaks for itself. Mullvad runs its servers entirely in RAM, which means nothing persists on disk at all. If someone physically seizes a server, whether cops, hackers, or any other third party, there is nothing to recover. No hidden logs, no user histories, no trails of activity. Most VPN providers claim to be no-log, but they still rely on disk-based servers, centralized account systems, or support databases that store information. Mullvad removes all those weak points entirely.
Modern encryption and standards are another area where Mullvad quietly outperforms everyone else. WireGuard is implemented properly, without custom wrappers or flashy branded protocols. Everything is open, understandable, and verifiable. Mullvad also supports advanced privacy features like DAITA, Multihop, Bridges, and quantum-resistant tunnels. These tools make it possible to route your traffic through multiple layers, bypass censorship, and prepare for future threats to encryption. ProtonVPN, NordVPN, and other mainstream providers mix in proprietary layers that look impressive to casual users but make it harder to know what is happening with the traffic flowing through their servers, and in some cases, they can hand data over to authorities.
The best part is how resilient Mullvad remains even when the surrounding world tries to block access. You can generate your account through Tor. You can download the client through Tor if the website is blocked. You can pay with cash or privacy-respecting cryptocurrencies without ever revealing your identity. That level of frictionless anonymity is unheard of among mainstream VPN providers. They simply cannot build something like that because their business model depends on identifying users, managing renewals, and storing payment histories.
If your goal is genuine privacy, Mullvad is one of the very few services that treats it as a mission rather than a marketing slogan. Everything else in the VPN ecosystem is a compromise, and some of those compromises go so far that they stop being privacy tools altogether. Opera’s “VPN” is the most extreme example, where you hand your data directly to a browser company with a documented history of selling user behavior.
In the end, the choice is simple. You can go with a service that protects you because it was built to protect you, or you can choose one that protects you only as long as it aligns with its business interests. Mullvad makes the first option real. The others do not.