Vivaldi Launches “Digital Dugnad” Push to Steer Users Away From Big Tech
Vivaldi Browser launched a public campaign this week calling on users to abandon major tech platforms and replace them with smaller, privacy-focused alternatives — starting with the browser itself.
The company branded the effort a “Digital Dugnad,” borrowing a Norwegian term that describes a collective effort by many people to solve a problem too large for any one person to tackle alone.
Vivaldi announced the campaign on its official website and on X on June 23, framing the open web as something still intact but buried beneath the commercial practices of large technology conglomerates.
“The free and open web still exists, it’s just buried under something ugly,” Vivaldi wrote in its post on X. “Let’s join forces.”
What the Campaign Asks Users to Do
The campaign lays out a step-by-step path away from dominant tech brands.
The first move, according to Vivaldi, is switching to a privacy-focused browser — the company names its own product but says Users Can choose any privacy-respecting option.
From there, Vivaldi advises switching to a less data-intensive search engine, citing DuckDuckGo as one example.
The company also recommends replacing mainstream email and cloud storage services with alternatives such as Proton Mail.
Once a user completes those switches, Vivaldi asks them to recruit others into the campaign — extending the dugnad model of collective, community-driven action.
The Argument Behind the Campaign
Vivaldi argues that major technology companies have turned the open web into a mechanism for Harvesting User attention and personal data at scale.
The company did not cite specific data to support that claim, but the broader concern it references has drawn scrutiny from regulators in multiple jurisdictions.
The European Commission fined Meta 1.2 billion euros in 2023 for transferring European user data to the United States in violation of EU privacy law, according to the European Data Protection Board.
That same year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission released a report finding that major platforms engaged in “vast” commercial surveillance of consumers with limited transparency.
Vivaldi, headquartered in Oslo, Norway, has taken parts of the campaign offline as well, running in-person outreach in Norway to explain alternatives to dominant tech services.
The browser, developed by former Opera Software co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, positions itself as a customizable, privacy-respecting alternative to browsers made by Alphabet’s Google and Apple.
Vivaldi does not publicly disclose its user numbers, so the scale of the campaign’s reach remains unclear.
