Editorial Policy
Every page on PrivacyAffairs has a named person who answers for it, and no company can pay for a better score or a kinder sentence.
What follows is how we actually work. When that changes, this page changes too, and the date at the bottom shows when.
Who writes and checks our pages
Miklos Zoltan founded PrivacyAffairs and is its editor-in-chief. He decides what we publish, sets the review scores and answers for the site as a whole. Laura Bede, a journalist, writes our news. Alex Popa, Shanika W., Miguel Gomez and Justin Oyaro complete our editorial staff, and other specialists contribute now and then. You’ll find their backgrounds on our About page and their author profiles.
A page can show up to three names:
- Author: the person who wrote the article. If the page is revised later, the original author stays on it.
- Updated by: the editor who later revised the text (beyond prices, links or typos). When the author makes the update, this line isn’t needed. Translations carry it too.
- Fact-checker: the person who checks the claims against their sources. Miklos and Laura check each other’s work.
How we choose topics
We write about what people need to know: questions readers search for or send us, and developments that change what they should do. We don’t publish pages to fill a keyword list. Old pages that no longer help anyone get merged into a better one or retired.
Research and sources
Primary sources come first. That means a provider’s own website and help pages, laws, court and regulator decisions, official statements and researchers’ own reports. Reputable press comes next. Results published by other review sites count as their claims, not as proof.
Facts that change, such as prices, features and server counts, carry the date we checked them. If a provider’s partner material disagrees with its live website, the live website wins. When a company asks us to correct a fact (a new price, a changed feature), we check it on the company’s own public pages before we change anything.
If we can’t verify a claim, it stays out.
How we use AI
AI tools assist our writers and editors with research, writing and translation. Every page is reviewed by a named person who answers for it.
Our translations are AI-assisted. If a translation and the English page differ, the English version is the reference.
The illustrations on our news and guides are AI-generated and labelled that way. They illustrate the topic and never show real people or brands. Screenshots show the real website or app as it looked when they were taken.
Reviews and scores
We score each service in six areas: pricing, locations, speed, privacy, support and ease of use. The overall score is their average, rounded to one decimal. The editor-in-chief decides the final scores, and the review explains the reasons behind each one.
Speed results carry the date of the test. If we haven’t re-run a test since, the review says so.
Our ranking lists are sorted by score. A commission has no say in either.
Independence and money
PrivacyAffairs earns affiliate commissions. When you buy a service through some of our links, the provider pays us a share, at no extra cost to you. How We Make Money has the details. Here is what that money doesn’t buy:
- Perks: no provider has given us free accounts, perks or bonuses.
- Scores and rankings: commission rates don’t affect them, and we tell partners so when we sign up.
- Previews: partners don’t see a review before it’s published.
- Favours: requests to raise a score, move a provider up a ranking or describe it more favourably are refused. None has been made so far.
- Ties: PrivacyAffairs and its team have no links to any VPN company beyond affiliate agreements.
Some guides include a box recommending one provider for the task. It’s always one we’d recommend for that job; where several qualify, we may pick one we have an affiliate deal with. We also recommend services that pay us nothing and link to them plainly. On our Russian pages, for example, Mullvad comes first.
We have never paid for a link or for coverage, and we don’t sell sponsored or guest posts. Sites that link to us found our work themselves, or we pitched it to a journalist who then decided whether to use it.
News
We ask the companies and organisations we report on for comment before we publish, and add their answer when it arrives.
Some sources want to stay anonymous, sometimes even to us: a researcher reporting a security flaw, for example. We publish such a story only after checking the evidence ourselves (confirming the flaw or the data sample) and asking the affected company for comment. The company gets time to fix the problem before we publish details that could put its users at risk. We never publish personal data from a leak. Claims from such a source are attributed to “an anonymous source” in the article, so you can weigh them accordingly.
Original research
Some pages are our own research: the Dark Web Price Index, the GDPR fines tracker and our statistics reports. Each one says how the data was collected and where it comes from.
The Dark Web Price Index is built by hand from listings on dark web marketplaces, forums and websites. Every fine in the GDPR tracker is checked against the data protection authority’s own decision or announcement. Other trackers help us find new fines, but we don’t take their figures on trust.
Opinion
We’re openly pro-privacy and against censorship. That shapes what we cover, including guides that help people get around online blocks. Opinions appear only in bylined articles and read as the author’s view. Our stance never changes a fact, a price or a score.
Updates and corrections
We update pages when the facts change, and updated pages carry a dated note.
Found a mistake? Email [email protected]. We reply within one working day and correct the page as soon as we’ve verified the problem. A correction that changes a fact, a number or a verdict gets a dated note on the page and a post on X (@Privacy_Affairs). Typos and broken links we simply fix.
Last updated: 9 November 2026