Why " * Privacy Guides shall not accept test/review accounts for subscription cloud services."?
Is this like a GoIncognito version of Techlore but in PG ?
We talked about the risk of receiving “golden review accounts” that are optimized for better performance or something. Using VPN providers as an example, it would be trivial for a VPN vendor to create an account for reviewers that has better QOS or bandwidth than regular accounts would. I think this is already commonplace practice in some industries, unfortunately.
It would be extremely difficult for us to detect this, and we would likely have to independently buy a subscription anyways in order to actually validate a regular customer’s experience.
Since most subscriptions are low-cost anyways, for anything we wish to review it is easier to simply buy it ourselves, instead of creating extra hassle on our end to save a few bucks.
The risk exists in locally-operated software and hardware too, but we think it is a lower risk and potentially easier to detect. It’s something we have to look out for in all cases though.
Also, Techlore recently experienced an incident where a community member was reaching out to providers and asking for free accounts, ostensibly to work on their open-source comparisons.
We want to make it very clear to any privacy vendors out there that Privacy Guides will simply never make any requests for review samples. If you receive such a request it should be reported to us.
If we really want to review something that one of us doesn’t have already, we will always purchase it ourselves instead of asking for permission or for a sample. These new policies are only in place for companies who reach out to us first, in which case we can sometimes accept the offer.
I thought this was for cloud services, like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Nextcloud, Cozycloud, Digital Ocean, AWS, Alibaba, and so on.
For example if Microsoft comes to you, says they are building a new privacy friendly product and wants to you test it and provide a review / test report, will you reject them?
Yes, it is for anything operated on remote servers we don’t control.
If Microsoft came to us and wanted us to review a new cloud product they’re offering, we would decline an account or subscription they offer us.
Now, if we were still interested in reviewing it anyways, we might purchase a subscription on our own to write a review. Companies can’t escape being reviewed by simply writing to us first 
What occurs to me is that we didn’t discuss a case where they are offering us a subscription to a product that doesn’t publicly exist yet. We were mainly thinking about existing subscription products we could just as easily purchase ourselves, like VPN accounts or something.
It might make sense for us to accept such an offer, as long as we clearly disclaimed in a review article that we were testing a special pre-release product that might not necessarily match what is eventually available… I’ll probably bring that up at our next meeting.
I do think that we probably want to avoid reviewing pre-released products in general, because I want part of our review to be the actual customer experience in terms of purchasing/service/etc. of course, so maybe this won’t actually matter.
What about asking for compensation after reviewing? Be an anonymous shopper, then after you are done, ask for a reimbursement? This only applies if a company asked for review.
Privacy Guides doesn’t have affiliate links because they influence, the review (consciously or unconsciously).
Asking for refund after will make reviewers angry whem a company refuse to do so. And the reviews will then be biased.
If they request for a compensation then that can influence the review quality and objectivity. There should be no monetary gain for reviews.
The moment any review is tied to any monetary gain, it instantly becomes a promotion and not a review.
There is and should be a clear line between a reviewer and a salesman or promoter, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
Not that we would gain any money here so to speak, but we have talked about this topic.
When we have the possibility to get our money back, there can be a small incentive to be nicer during the review.
Now, I do not think anyone would sell out for 20 bucks (especially as its 20 bucks of PG’s funds and not personal funds). But the risk is simply not worth it for such a small amount of money, and simply decided against it all together.
Oh man, youy would be surprised what (perspective of earning) money can do with people…
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