You should know who pays for anything that tells you which products to trust. Here is ours, including the parts that would be easier not to say.
This site currently costs one person their evenings and about twenty dollars a year in domain fees. Nothing here is sponsored, nobody has paid for placement, and no organisation has any say in what it says.
That may change, and if it does this page changes with it, before the money arrives rather than after.
Affiliate commissions. Not from privacy tools, VPNs, password managers, data-broker removal services, phones, or anything else we assess. Every link here is a plain link. If we ever recommend a product, nobody paid us to.
Payment for referrals. If we point you at a person or firm, we are not being paid for it and never will be.
Money from anyone we write about. This is the rule the other two come from. Whoever pays us must not be a subject of the reference.
We are stating this while the answer is still "nobody pays us," because a promise made before there is money on the table is worth more than one made after.
Licensing. An association, employer or professional body paying to give this reference to its members, with no editorial input. They are not the subject of any entry, so nothing is compromised. See for organisations.
A single disclosed sponsor from outside every category we assess — a credit union or a professional body, never a maker of software we review. Named on this page, with no say in content.
Either way, the public reference stays free and unchanged. That is not generosity. A licence is worth nothing if the thing being licensed is compromised.
Read the tools comparison. It concludes that the best result came from doing it yourself for nothing, and that the cheapest paid service outperformed one costing twelve times more.
No affiliate-funded site publishes that, because it is the least profitable possible conclusion. That page is the evidence for everything on this one.
And read the corrections. Every mistake we have made is there, dated, with what was wrong and why.