Contribute: Help Make Antivirus Reviews Honest

Independent labs publish protection rates and performance numbers. Marketing departments publish the upbeat version. The gap between those two bodies of evidence — the part that affects you on a Tuesday night when an installer hangs, when an upsell pop-up blocks a deadline, when a renewal triples the launch price — is the part that almost never gets written up.

Readers see that gap first. A subscriber who has run McAfee on a six-year-old laptop for fourteen months knows things our lab fleet does not. A small-business owner whose antivirus killed a payroll PDF on the last day of the quarter knows things AV-TEST will never measure. Those are the experiences that turn a sterile six-pillar score into something a real person can act on.

Reader contributions inform two parts of SafeScan Now. First, the Privacy History and Pricing pillars — both of which are penalty-based and rely partly on documentary evidence (renewal invoices, pop-up screenshots, cancellation friction logs). Second, the article corrections log: when a reader catches an outdated price or a misattributed quote, the fix lands inline on the page with the date and the editor responsible.

Every contribution is read by one of the four named editors on /editorial-team/. The editor who reads it signs the response and adds the submission to a dated, indexed editorial log. No submissions are silently discarded — even submissions we cannot use receive a personal reply within ten business days.

If a submission contains a verifiable claim (a renewal price, an undisclosed ownership relationship, a documented privacy incident), we reproduce the claim independently before it touches the score. Reproduction means: pull the renewal invoice, install the affected product on lab hardware, or trace the corporate filing — whichever applies. Only verified claims affect the scoring matrix.

If a submission contains an unverifiable but plausible claim (a one-off bug, a single support-ticket failure), we file it as a 'pattern flag.' A pattern flag has no scoring weight on its own, but if three or more independent submitters report the same behaviour against the same product within a quarter, the editor responsible for that brand opens a formal investigation. We disclose pattern flags publicly on /transparency/ once an investigation is open.

Brand pitches. If you work for an antivirus vendor, an affiliate manager, or a PR agency representing one, this is the wrong form. Use editorial@safescannow.com and tell us up front who you represent — we will read the message, but we do not run vendor submissions through the reader pipeline, and we do not accept paid placements under any circumstances.

Affiliate-flavoured content. We do not accept guest posts, sponsored reviews, or 'partnership' content of any kind. There is no exception for 'no-follow' links, 'just one mention,' or 'industry expert' bylines. The editorial calendar is set by the four full-time editors and nobody else.

Anonymous attack pieces. A reader experience needs a real person on the receiving end of a follow-up — even if we publish you as an alias. If we cannot reach you, we cannot use the submission. This is for your protection as much as ours: every claim we cite is one we are willing to defend in writing.

Send corrections to corrections@safescannow.com with the URL of the page, the specific claim that is wrong, and (if possible) the source for the correct version. We log every correction inline on the original page with the date and the editor responsible — quiet edits are not allowed.

Common corrections we welcome: outdated renewal pricing, lab data that has refreshed since publication, ownership changes (acquisitions, divestitures), broken or expired affiliate links, schema or markup errors, accessibility issues, and outright factual mistakes. None of these are 'too small' to report.

If you are a journalist, security researcher, or ex-employee of an antivirus vendor and you have information that the public should know — undisclosed ownership relationships, suppressed lab data, regulatory action, leaked telemetry analysis — send a first contact to legal@safescannow.com. The mailbox is read by Maria Volkov (CIPP/E, our Privacy Analyst) and is the only contact path we offer for source-protected material.

We do not pay for tips. We do not promise publication. We will treat first contacts with the same source-protection norms used by serious investigative outlets: source identity is held by the contacted editor only, anonymous sourcing is offered when warranted, and we never confirm a source's existence to a third party — even under legal pressure — without the source's written consent.

For ordinary press queries (interview requests, comment on a story, fact-checking a quote attributed to SafeScan Now), use press@safescannow.com instead. Response time is two business days for press, ten business days for reader contributions.