Members of the Tor community have asked us to explain how continued collaboration with Mullvad fits with the Tor Project's human rights mission. We have heard both calls to end the relationship and concerns about what that would mean for Tor's work and the communities affected. We want to explain our decision to continue our technical collaboration with Mullvad and acknowledge the difficult trade-offs behind it. Our decision followed a thorough due diligence process that involved extensive discussions with community members, staff, and the board, a staff survey, and detailed financial analysis and scenario planning.
The Tor Project’s mission is to advance human rights and freedoms. We build privacy and anti-censorship tools that people use to protect themselves from repression and surveillance, and express themselves freely. We will continue this work alongside communities whose rights are under threat.
While Tor defends free speech, not all speech is equally compatible with our mission. We strongly oppose rhetoric that threatens other human rights and freedoms.
The work to promote and preserve the human right to privacy, free speech, and free access to information online is severely under-resourced. This work requires and benefits from collaboration across organizations. Sometimes that work requires making difficult compromises to advance specific goals we know will benefit our communities in the long run.
We are continuing our technical collaboration with Mullvad to sustain work that Tor users and contributors depend on. This collaboration has helped improve the structure, maintainability, and auditability of Tor Browser’s codebase, expanded feedback from users beyond Tor Browser’s core audience, and created a lower-risk environment to test features that may later benefit Tor Browser users. It also gives more people access to online privacy through an additional free, open-source tool that serves different user needs. We recognize that the potential benefits to Mullvad of such a collaboration are difficult for some in our community to accept. Our responsibility is to ensure that this collaboration does not compromise our mission or the Tor Project's independence.
Tor Project has paused proactive co-branding with Mullvad. That pause applies to joint promotional activity while the technical collaboration continues in alignment with our narrowly scoped agreement. We have also reviewed how Mullvad Browser is described and endorsed on our owned channels, and clarified language suggesting broader alignment between our values. These changes are intended to describe the relationship more accurately and avoid notions of implied endorsement.
We know this decision will not satisfy everyone. Continuing the collaboration carries a cost to trust for some in our community, and we take that seriously. We are grateful to the members of our community who have raised concerns, asked hard questions, and reminded us what is at stake. Those concerns are shaping our path forward. Tor’s mission has always required both principle and pragmatism. We will continue to defend privacy, anonymity, freedom of expression, and access to information while making clear that our collaborations must serve, and never obscure, our human rights commitments.