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About Arcadia Group

A small informational site about consumer desktop antivirus software, written for readers in Australia, funded by commission, and explicit about both of those things.

Who publishes this site

Arcadia Group is published by Human Protection s.r.o., a company registered in the Czech Republic.

"Arcadia Group" is the name of this publication. It is not a security vendor, a reseller, a testing laboratory or an authorised partner of any software company, and it does not sell software, licences or support of any kind.

What the site covers

The subject is consumer antivirus and security software for desktop and laptop computers running Windows, macOS and Linux, written from an Australian perspective — Australian consumer rights, Australian regulators, prices discussed in AUD where money is mentioned at all.

Deliberately outside the scope: business and enterprise security products, mobile phone and tablet applications, network hardware, and anything that would amount to individual technical or legal advice.

How coverage is decided

This is the part most sites in this category leave vague, so here it is in full.

Products are named only where a commercial relationship exists. At present that is one vendor, Avast, and the arrangement is a referral commission described on our affiliate disclosure page. Every other product is discussed as a category — "built-in protection", "free tiers", "paid suites" — because we have not tested or surveyed the market and naming products would imply that we had.

We publish no scores, ratings or rankings. We do not operate a laboratory. Detection performance is measured by organisations that do, and we point to them — AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives — rather than reproducing figures that go stale.

We publish no prices. Introductory and renewal figures differ and change without notice, so the vendor's own site is the only reliable place to read them.

Commission does not determine what a page says. The vendor profile is the most constrained page on the site precisely because it concerns the product we are paid to link to. What commission does determine is which product is named at all, and we state that on the page rather than implying a wider survey.

Topics are chosen from the questions readers actually ask. Renewals, free versus paid, whether built-in protection is sufficient, and what to do about an alarming pop-up account for most of the correspondence we receive, and they account for most of the site.

An honest narrow scope is the position we prefer to a claim of independence that the funding model would not support.

How pages are written and reviewed

Pages are written and reviewed by the Arcadia Group editorial team. We do not attach personal bylines, invent expert personas, or publish staff biographies, because a name on a page is only meaningful if the reader can verify it and here they could not.

Each page carries a "last reviewed" date. Review means someone has read the page against its sources and against current practice, and either updated it or confirmed it still stands. Where a page makes a factual claim about a regulator, a law or a technical mechanism, it links to the body that says it, so you can check rather than take our word.

What we cannot do

• Diagnose a problem on your computer, or recommend what you personally should buy.
• Provide legal advice about your consumer rights — the ACCC is the authority, and its consumer pages are the place to begin.
• Access, cancel, refund or change any account you hold with a software vendor.
• Help with an incident in progress. For that, the Australian Cyber Security Centre and Scamwatch are the right places.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, tell us and we will fix it. Email info@arcadiagroup.online with the page address and what you think is incorrect. Substantive corrections change the "last reviewed" date on the page concerned. We would rather be corrected by a reader than leave an error sitting in a guide someone is using to make a decision.

The contact page sets out what we can and cannot respond to, and how long a reply usually takes.