Terms of Use

By visiting, browsing, or otherwise interacting with safescannow.com (the 'Site'), you accept these Terms of Use ('Terms'). If you do not accept any part of these Terms, you should leave the Site and not use it. Continued use after we publish a material change to these Terms (with notice as described in section 15) is your acceptance of the change.

These Terms form a binding agreement between you and SafeScan Now Editorial ('SafeScan Now', 'we', 'us', 'our'). The legal entity behind SafeScan Now, the trading address, and the postal address for written legal correspondence are listed on /contact/.

If you are using the Site on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have the authority to bind that organisation to these Terms, and 'you' in these Terms refers to both you personally and that organisation.

You may read, link to, share, and quote from the Site freely, subject to the intellectual-property terms in section 5. You may use the public tools at /tools/ for ordinary personal or professional research. You may submit reader contributions through the /contribute/ and /contact/ forms. You may subscribe to our editorial communications.

You agree NOT to: probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Site or any associated network in ways that exceed normal browsing; bypass any rate limits, CAPTCHAs, or access controls; submit malware, illegal content, or content that infringes third-party rights through our forms; impersonate another person; collect personal data of any reader or editor through scraping, fingerprinting, or any automated means; or use the Site, our APIs, or our editorial content to train an AI model that competes with SafeScan Now's editorial product, except as expressly permitted in writing.

You agree to respect any robots.txt, rate limits, or technical signal we publish indicating how automated agents may interact with the Site. Reasonable, well-behaved crawlers (search engines, accessibility tools, citation indexes) are welcome; abusive crawlers will be blocked at the edge.

The tools at /tools/ — including the Antivirus Finder Quiz, the Free Online Scanner, and the Password Strength Checker — are provided for general informational purposes. They are not professional security advice. They are not guaranteed to identify every malicious file, every phishing URL, or every weak password. The output of any tool is one input among many for your security decisions; it is not the only input.

The Quiz returns an editorial shortlist based on the answers you give and the scoring matrix we publish on /methodology/. The shortlist is not a legal recommendation, a fitness-for-purpose guarantee, or financial advice. The Free Online Scanner forwards your input to the VirusTotal API; the result is the upstream provider's verdict, not ours, and is governed in part by VirusTotal's own terms. The Password Strength Checker runs in your browser and checks against the Have-I-Been-Pwned k-anonymity API; the result is an estimate of strength, not a security guarantee.

You agree to use the tools only against inputs you are entitled to test (your own URLs, your own files, your own passwords) and not against systems or assets you do not have permission to assess.

When you submit content to SafeScan Now through /contribute/, /contact/, or other channels (an 'Open Submission'), you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual licence to read, archive, edit, paraphrase, quote, and (where you have given explicit permission) publicly display that submission for our editorial purposes. We do not transfer the licence to third parties, and we do not republish a submission as our own work.

You represent that you own or have permission to share any content you submit, that the content does not infringe third-party rights, and that the factual claims you make are true to the best of your knowledge. We may reject, decline to publish, or anonymise any submission for any reason, including reasons unrelated to the quality of the submission.

You may withdraw any unpublished submission by writing to corrections@safescannow.com. After publication (whether as a quoted reader experience, a correction log entry, or any other public form), you may request anonymisation or correction at any time; we will action a verifiable request within 30 days, but we will not retroactively delete a published correction log entry, since doing so would defeat the public-accountability purpose of the log.

All editorial content on the Site — articles, methodology pages, scoring data, illustrations, layouts, code, design system — is © 2026 SafeScan Now Editorial, except where attributed to a third party. Lab data we cite is owned by the labs that produced it (AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives, SE Labs, MRG Effitas, ICSA Labs) and used under fair-use / fair-dealing principles for journalistic commentary.

You may quote up to 200 words of SafeScan Now editorial in any single publication or post, with attribution and a link back to the source page. You may not republish entire articles, our scoring matrix, our pillar weights, or our brand-comparison tables without written permission. Translations into another language are permitted under the same terms; machine-translated republication of a full article is not.

Vendor logos and product names belong to their respective owners and appear on the Site for editorial identification only. Their inclusion does not imply endorsement, partnership, or commercial relationship with SafeScan Now beyond what is disclosed on /affiliate-disclosure/.

AI-training note: we do not consent to large-scale ingestion of SafeScan Now editorial into AI training corpora that produce competing review-style outputs. If you are an AI lab and want to license SafeScan Now content for fair-use research or for retrieval-augmented citation (with attribution), write to legal@safescannow.com.

The Site, the editorial content, the tools, and any data we publish are provided 'as is' and 'as available'. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we disclaim all warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise — including any warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or availability.

We make every reasonable effort to keep editorial content accurate and current. We test antivirus products on real hardware, we cite independent labs, and we log corrections inline. We nevertheless do not warrant that the editorial content is error-free, that lab data is up to the minute, or that scoring decisions will not change as new evidence comes in. Treat any specific recommendation as one input among several and verify the renewal price, the platform support, and the latest lab cycle before purchase.

Nothing on the Site is professional security advice, professional legal advice, or financial advice. If you are evaluating antivirus for a regulated environment (healthcare, financial services, government), consult a qualified professional and verify the product against your specific compliance requirements.

Some outbound product links on the Site are affiliate links, marked in compliance with FTC 16 CFR Part 255. The full disclosure is at /affiliate-disclosure/. By using the Site, you acknowledge that you have read or have the opportunity to read that disclosure, and you understand that affiliate compensation does not influence the order of products in our rankings, the pillar weights in our methodology, or the editorial calendar.

The Site links to third-party websites, lab reports, vendor pages, and academic sources. Those third parties have their own terms and privacy policies, which apply to your interaction with them. We are not responsible for the content, accuracy, security, or privacy practices of any third-party site. A link from SafeScan Now to a third party is not an endorsement of that third party except where we explicitly recommend the third party in editorial content.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event shall SafeScan Now, its editors, contributors, or affiliates be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages — including but not limited to loss of profits, loss of data, loss of goodwill, business interruption, or any damages arising from a security incident on a product we reviewed — arising from or in connection with your use of the Site, the tools, or the editorial content.

Our total aggregate liability to any single user, for any cause of action arising from these Terms or your use of the Site, is limited to the greater of (a) US$100 or (b) the amount you have paid SafeScan Now in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim. (For most readers this is US$100, since SafeScan Now does not charge readers.)

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages. To the extent your jurisdiction does not allow such exclusion, the exclusions and limitations above apply only to the maximum extent permitted by your local law, and your statutory rights as a consumer remain unaffected — see section 14.

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless SafeScan Now and its editors against any claim, demand, loss, damage, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Site or its tools, your infringement of any third-party right through content you submit, or your use of the Site for any purpose forbidden in section 2.

This indemnification does not apply to claims arising from SafeScan Now's gross negligence or wilful misconduct.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Site, or to specific tools and features, at our discretion — particularly where we have a reasonable belief that you have breached these Terms, that your usage threatens the security or stability of the Site, or that your usage exceeds normal ratelimits in a way that materially affects other readers. Termination does not extinguish any rights or obligations that survive by their nature (intellectual-property terms, liability limitations, indemnification, dispute-resolution provisions).

These Terms, your use of the Site, and any non-contractual obligations arising from or in connection with them are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Where consumer-protection laws of your jurisdiction grant you mandatory rights that cannot be excluded by choice of law (for example, the EU Unfair Contract Terms Directive 93/13/EEC, the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, and analogous statutes), those rights apply notwithstanding this section. Section 14 makes that explicit.

Before filing any formal dispute, you agree to send a written notice to legal@safescannow.com describing the dispute, the relief you are seeking, and your contact information. We agree to do the same. We will both attempt good-faith resolution within 60 days of the notice. Many disputes can be resolved at this stage; the rest cannot, and the formal process applies.

Any dispute that cannot be resolved informally shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in New Castle County, Delaware, and you and SafeScan Now both consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. Class-action waivers and forced-arbitration clauses do not apply to consumer claims by EU, UK, or California residents to the extent prohibited by their local law (see section 14).

Either party may seek injunctive or other equitable relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or confidential information without first satisfying the informal-resolution step.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction whose consumer-protection laws grant you rights that cannot be waived by contract, those rights apply to your use of the Site notwithstanding any other provision of these Terms. Specifically:

EU consumers may bring proceedings in the courts of their member state of habitual residence under Article 18(2) of the Brussels I Regulation (Recast). UK consumers may bring proceedings in their local court under Section 75A of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 (where applicable) and the Consumer Rights Act 2015. California residents retain all rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) and the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, including the right to a small-claims court forum for claims within statutory limits.

We will revise these Terms when our editorial practice changes in a way that affects readers, when the legal landscape shifts, or when a reader points out something that needs clearer language. Material changes are signposted at the top of this page for at least 30 days, announced in the next newsletter cycle, and dated below the title.

A diff log of every revision to these Terms is available on request to legal@safescannow.com. Quiet edits to the Terms are not allowed.

For legal correspondence, including takedown requests, regulatory notices, and dispute-resolution notices: legal@safescannow.com. The mailbox is read by our Privacy Analyst (Maria Volkov) within three working days. Postal address available on /contact/.

For ordinary editorial questions, corrections, or contributions, see /contact/ for the appropriate inbox. Sending an editorial inquiry to legal@safescannow.com will slow the response.