Editorial policy

How this site is written, sourced, funded and corrected — and the specific things we will not do to sell a product.

1. Who writes this site

sapphirebaylife.online is published by Burksled s.r.o., and editorial responsibility rests with Karen Taylor, director of publication. Every article carries a named byline and a publication date, and the named person is accountable for what is in it. We do not publish anonymously and we do not publish under invented author personas.

We are transparent about our production process. Drafting and editing software, including language models, may be used to prepare and structure a draft. Nothing is published on that basis alone: every factual claim is checked against a primary source by the named editor, who reviews and signs off the final text and is responsible for it. Where a claim cannot be verified against a primary source, it is either hedged explicitly or cut.

2. How we establish facts

• Primary sources first. For a product’s specification, the vendor’s own current product page and documentation are the authority — not a press release, not another publisher’s summary, and not what the product used to include two years ago.
• Independent testing for performance claims. Where we discuss how well security software detects threats, we point to the published work of independent laboratories (AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs) and we link to them so you can read the round yourself.
• Institutional sources for threat claims. Statements about how attacks actually happen are grounded in public reporting from bodies such as ENISA, Europol, CISA and the Czech NÚKIB, rather than in vendor marketing.
• Dated and linked. Sources are listed at the foot of each article with working links. Where a figure moves over time, we date it or decline to print it.
• Hedging is not weakness. If we are not certain, the text says so. We would rather write "Norton lists 2 GB at the time of writing; confirm on the order screen" than print a confident number that turns out to be regional.
• The vendor prevails. Every product article states that where our description diverges from the vendor’s own published information, the vendor’s information prevails.

3. How this site is funded

Entirely by affiliate commission. When a reader follows a partner link and buys a subscription, the advertiser pays Burksled s.r.o. a commission. The reader pays no more than they would have paid going direct. We receive no payment for writing a positive review, no payment for placement, and no payment per page view. We accept no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid guest articles. The affiliate disclosure sets this out in detail.

Every page that carries a commercial link says so in a bar at the top of the page and in a disclosure box directly beneath the headline, before any promotional content. Each individual button is labelled as a partner link and carries a note under it explaining the commission. We do not consider a single line of small print in a footer to be adequate disclosure.

4. What we will not do

These are commitments, not aspirations. Each of them describes a practice that is common in affiliate publishing and that we refuse.

• No invented testimonials. We will not publish a "reader story", a "reader-submitted experience", a quoted customer or a named case study that we did not obtain from a real, identifiable person who consented to it. The earlier version of our Norton article was framed as a reader story; it was not one, and we removed that framing.
• No invented ratings. No star scores, no "9.4/10", no award badges and no "Editor’s Choice" seal that is not backed by a published, repeatable methodology. We currently publish no numerical scores at all, because we do not run a test laboratory.
• No fake test results. We will not reproduce a detection percentage without its source, its test date and a link to the laboratory that produced it.
• No artificial urgency. No countdown timers, no "offer ends at midnight", no "only 3 licences left", no fake stock counters and no manufactured price deadline.
• No guaranteed-result claims. No security product makes anyone "100% safe" or "completely protected", and we will not write that it does. Where a vendor offers a guarantee, we describe it as what it is — a commercial commitment with published conditions — rather than as a promise of outcomes.
• No fear-based selling. We will not overstate a threat to move a product. Where a free built-in alternative is adequate for a reader, as Microsoft Defender often is, we say so — even though saying so costs us commission.
• No fabricated comparisons. We will not invent a rival product, misstate a competitor’s features, or construct a comparison table we have not verified.
• No hidden commercial links. Every commercial link is marked in the HTML with rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" and visibly labelled on the page. We will not disguise one as an ordinary editorial link.
• No tracking the reader. Set out in the cookie policy: no cookies, no analytics, no pixels, no third-party requests.
• No product screenshots or stock photography. Every image on this site is an original diagram we drew. We do not use vendor screenshots or brand artwork to imply an association we do not have.

5. Independence from advertisers

• Advertisers and affiliate networks have no right of review over our content before publication. No draft is sent to an advertiser for approval.
• Commission rate plays no part in whether or how favourably a product is covered.
• We publish critical statements about products we earn commission on where the facts warrant it — for example that the Norton AntiVirus Plus tier does not include a VPN, covers one device only, and renews at a higher price than the advertised one.
• If an advertiser asks us to remove or soften an accurate statement, we decline, and we would rather lose the relationship than the statement.
• We name the brands we discuss for identification only, under no licence and with no endorsement. See the trade mark notice in the footer of every page.

6. Corrections procedure

We publish about products whose specifications and prices change without warning. Some of what we write will go out of date, and some of it will simply be wrong. The procedure is:

1. Report it. E-mail [email protected] with the page address, the statement you believe is wrong, and — if you have one — a source. Anyone may do this: readers, vendors, competitors.
2. We acknowledge within five working days.
3. We verify against the primary source. If we cannot verify the original claim, we do not leave it standing while we investigate: we remove or hedge it immediately.
4. We correct in place and update the "last reviewed" date on the page.
5. We record material corrections publicly. Where a correction changes the substance of what a reader would conclude, we describe what was wrong and what it was changed to, on the page itself — as we have done in the corrections section of our Norton article, and we list every such correction, dated, in the public corrections log. We do not quietly edit and pretend the earlier version never existed.

7. Scope and limits of what we publish

This site publishes general consumer information about computer security. It is not legal advice, not financial advice, and not a professional security assessment of your particular situation. We do not run a test laboratory and we do not claim to have independently benchmarked the products we describe; where we discuss measured performance we cite the people who measured it.

• PublisherBurksled s.r.o.
• Registered addressNa dolinách 1272/41, Nusle, 140 00 Praha 4
• Company number19127812
• VAT numberCZ19127812
• Director of publicationKaren Taylor
• Contact[email protected]
• Websitehttps://sapphirebaylife.online/