this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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Damn, that ad is awful. Put yourself in the shoes of a normie seeing this and then evaluate it. Someone supremely high on the smell of their own farts made this.
If you think "Someone supremely high on the smell of their own farts made this," then you are part of the problem with the world today and the reason why they're able to get away with mass surveillance. This message is incredibly important, and you're writing it off as pretentious. Fucking bootlickers.
The advert is awful because regular people won't get it and yes, it seems pretentious as fuck. I said nothing about the broader message so keep your hallucinations to yourself.
As for your ad hominem attack, you don't know me. Do better.
I don't get why you think its awful. How would a normie evaluate this in your opinion?
"Monitoring pedophiles in my area is probably a good thing. Wait, monitoring myself? Isn't that my choice? Wait, now protestors? That's bad, usually... Wait, graffiti artists? Well some of... Wait, women?"
But that's the point of the ad, to convey that surveillance of a specific group of people will sooner or later be exploited to monitor anyone, no matter their involvement. Therefore you should invest in a VPN.
But the question is, are you translating it that way because you know what they were trying to convey, or because they actually conveyed it that way? Because the average person is going to just see good thing, bad thing, good thing, bad thing.
And would you expect the average person to parse it correctly within the time it aired?
Glad I'm not the only one who thought so. I agree with the ad exclusively because I can project my own opinions about surveillance being bad onto it, but some of it makes no sense.
And if you're able to come up with answers to all these questions, were you able to come up with all those answers in the time you were allotted to think about each mentioned group before the ad snapped to a new one?
this is more nitpicky than your points (which i agree with) and i know that as they've made an advert in english they'll want to reuse it in all english speaking regions, but i'm not sure how a car full of americans talking about cilantro and president nixon is likely to endear them to UK customers
Maybe the best thing that happened to this advertising is the fact it got banned. The ad might be incomprehensible, but it's not offensive. I'm drinking my glass of cilantro juice to the hope it got people talking.
probably so. there may be a contingent of users who will be suspicious of flamboyant advertising for such a service (see nordvpn) but they're not the target here so mullvad will probably get their money's worth regardless. personally i'm paid up till september through mozilla so will consider what to do.
mine's a coriander, cheers
Yeah, it's terrible. Made with AI is my guess too? Mullvad are good at VPN services but not so much video marketing.