Methodology

How a report is made

Every finding is read out of a company’s own published privacy policy. Each one is shown with the wording it came from, so you can check our summary against the source without leaving the page. Nothing is inferred about a company beyond what its policy states.

Reports highlight selected disclosures and do not claim to capture every practice or detail. A finding is our reading of a sentence, not a legal conclusion, and none of this is legal advice.

We do not score, grade or rank companies. A report with more findings is a report where our reading found more to record, which is as much a fact about the length of the policy as about the company.

Each finding links to the company’s published policy page it was read from and shows the date Plainlyst captured a copy of that page. A company can change its policy afterwards, so a report describes the document as it read when it was captured, and the linked page may no longer say the same thing. Where we have not established which document a finding came from, the report says so instead of linking one.

What we do not do

• No scores. There is no grade, no rating and no safe-or-unsafe. Rolling “states it may, if you switch it on” and “does, by default” into one number destroys the distinction the product exists to preserve.
• No inference. If a policy does not say something, we do not report it. A gap in a policy is a gap in what we can tell you, and we say so rather than filling it.
• No paraphrase without the source. Every finding carries the company’s own sentence underneath it.