What is it about a company spreading awareness about their product that weirds you out in particular, I'm curious? Billboard advertisements are an awareness type of advertisement. I'd be much more concerned to learn about paid endorsements, which they document on their website that they specifically do not do. Endorsements are a much more sensitive form of advertising, where once money trades hands for an endorsement, it stops being a useful third party assessment and starts being an advertisement disguised as a third party assessment. Awareness advertisements just make good business sense, so I'm genuinely curious why those would shy anybody away.
I agree with you, but I also understand where GP is coming from. For the past 20 years, what people are mostly exposed to is internet ads, which are, to put it mildly, pushy. As a result, all ads now have to deal with considerable negative sentiment as a baseline simply by virtue of being ads.
I saw them on the side of a CTA bus for the first time the other day. I don’t think it is bad at all, but the initial reaction for me as an American used to typical bus advertising it was exactly as if seeing an ad for 4chan there. It just isn’t the expected modality for the product.
(Seeing the reply down thread from a Mullvad rep, this is not unexpected)
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.
