Editorial policy

How this site is written, funded and corrected. Last reviewed 21 September 2026. Responsible editor: Andrew Wright.

This site is advertising-funded. That creates an obvious incentive to be flattering about the products it links to. This page exists so you can see exactly what we do about that incentive, and hold us to it.

Who writes here

Editorial content on Zlatoven is written and signed by Andrew Wright, who is also the director of publication for ABAJ CZ s.r.o. and is responsible for everything published here. Articles carry a named byline and a publication date. We do not publish anonymous articles, and we do not publish articles under invented author names or invented credentials.

Where an article is later revised, the change is recorded in the corrections log below rather than made silently.

How we establish facts

Our working rule is simple: state the source, or state the uncertainty. In practice that means:

• Testing results come from the laboratories that produced them. For consumer security software that means AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives. We link to them and tell you to check the current round yourself, because a score reprinted on a page like this one ages into a misleading claim.
• We do not run our own detection tests. We are not equipped to, and we say so rather than implying a laboratory we do not have.
• Product specifications come from the vendor. Tiers, features, platform support, system requirements and prices are the vendor’s to define and change. Where our description differs from the vendor’s current pages, the vendor’s own information prevails and we say so on the page.
• Legal and threat-landscape statements are sourced to primary material — EUR-Lex for EU legislation, ENISA and national cybersecurity agencies for threat guidance, vendor documentation for product behaviour.
• Where we cannot verify something, we hedge it in plain words or leave it out. We do not repeat an unsourced figure because a competitor page repeats it.
• Our own assessments are labelled as ours and separated from sourced fact.

Every article ends with a list of the sources used, distinguishing plain reference links from partner links.

How this site is funded

Zlatoven has one revenue source: affiliate commissions. When a reader follows a link marked “partner link” and subsequently subscribes to the vendor’s product, the vendor pays ABAJ CZ s.r.o. a share of the sale.

Three things follow, and we commit to all three:

• The price you pay is the vendor’s price. Using our link adds nothing to your bill, and no discount is conditional on using it. You can go to the vendor directly and pay the same.
• Disclosure comes before the promotion, not after it. There is a disclosure bar at the top of every page, a disclosure box immediately under the headline before any promotional content, a visible “partner link” label on every commercial button including those in sidebars, and a commission note under each one. Every commercial link carries rel="sponsored nofollow".
• We are not paid for an opinion. The commission is the same whatever we conclude. No vendor reviews our copy before publication, and no vendor has any right of approval over it.

We accept no payment for a favourable review, no payment to remove criticism, and no payment for a placement presented as editorial.

Advertiser independence

Commercial arrangements do not determine editorial judgement. Concretely:

• The article on this site states plainly where the product’s marketing overstates what it does — including on performance optimisation, where we side against the advertiser’s own framing.
• The article tells readers that the free tool built into Windows may be sufficient for some of them, which is against our commercial interest, because it is true.
• The article tells readers to check the renewal price and locate the cancellation control before buying.
• We link to the vendor’s own site with a plain, non-commission link in the sources list, so readers who prefer not to use a partner link can avoid it.

If a vendor asked us to remove any of that as a condition of the partnership, we would end the partnership rather than the sentence.

What we will not do

These are commitments, not aspirations. If you find us breaking one, tell us and we will correct it publicly.

• No invented testimonials. We publish no “reader stories”, no “reader-submitted experiences”, no user quotes and no case studies. Where such material existed on this site previously, it has been removed. If we ever publish a genuine reader comment, it will be identified as such with the reader’s permission.
• No invented ratings. No star ratings, no scores out of ten, no “editor’s score” that we did not measure. We point to the laboratories that actually measure things instead.
• No fabricated statistics or specifications. No percentage improvements, detection rates, user counts or performance figures without a source you can check. If we cannot source it, it does not appear.
• No artificial urgency. No countdown timers, no “offer ends tonight”, no fake stock counters, no “X people are viewing this”. Promotions in this category are effectively permanent, and we say so.
• No guaranteed-outcome claims. No security product prevents every compromise and we will not imply one does.
• No fear-based misdirection. No fake virus alerts, no simulated scans, no warnings about the reader’s device that we have no way of knowing anything about.
• No impersonation. We do not use vendor branding, vendor logos, vendor screenshots or vendor artwork in a way that suggests we are the vendor or are endorsed by them. The site is named after its domain, not after any product.
• No hidden advertising. Nothing commercial appears on this site without being labelled as commercial before the reader reaches it.
• No data collection in exchange for content. There is no newsletter sign-up, no contact form, no gated content and no lead capture of any kind.

Our position on reader data

We collect nothing. No cookies, no local storage, no analytics, no advertising pixels, no fingerprinting, no third-party requests of any kind. Every asset on this site — stylesheet, script, images, fonts — is served from this domain. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. The cookie policy explains how to verify that in your browser in under a minute, and we would rather you checked than took our word for it.

Illustrations

All diagrams and illustrations on this site are original SVG drawings created for it. We do not use product screenshots, vendor artwork or stock photography, both because reusing a vendor’s imagery on an advertising-funded page raises trademark and copyright problems, and because a diagram we drew ourselves can be made to explain the actual mechanism rather than to decorate. Each illustration carries a description for screen readers and a caption saying what it shows.

Corrections procedure

We correct errors rather than deleting them quietly.

1. Report it. Write to info@zlatoven.online with the page, the passage and, if you have one, a source. You can also write to ABAJ CZ s.r.o. at Čajkovského 1684/29, Žižkov, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic.
2. We check it. We aim to acknowledge within five working days and to resolve within ten. We will tell you what we concluded either way.
3. We fix it in place and log the change below, with the date and what changed. A correction that materially changes the meaning of a passage is also noted on the page itself.
4. If we disagree, we say so and explain why, rather than leaving the report unanswered.

A right of reply is available to any person or company identified on this site who considers they have been misrepresented. Write to the address above.

Corrections log

If you are not satisfied

If you have raised something with us and are not satisfied with the outcome, you can contact the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (Česká obchodní inspekce) on advertising and consumer matters, or, for data protection, the Úřad pro ochranu osobních údajů or the supervisory authority in your own member state. Details are in the legal notice.