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Affiliate Disclosure

Effective date: 17 September 2026

Arcadia Group is funded by referral commission. This page explains who pays it, what triggers it, what it costs you, and — the part that matters most — what it does and does not influence in what you read here.

The arrangement, in one paragraph

Certain links on this site lead to the website of a software vendor. If you follow one of those links and then create and activate an account with that vendor, the vendor pays Human Protection s.r.o., the publisher of Arcadia Group, a commission for the referral. That payment is the site's income. At present the arrangement is with one vendor, Avast, whose consumer desktop products are the subject of our vendor profile page.

What it costs you

Nothing. The commission is paid by the vendor out of its own margin. You are not charged more for arriving through this site than you would be by typing the vendor's address into your browser directly, and we have no ability to alter the price you see. Whatever the vendor charges is what the vendor charges.

What the commission does influence

Being honest about this is more useful than a blanket assurance of independence, so here it is directly.

It determines which product is named at all. Arcadia Group names a commercial product only where we have a commercial relationship with its vendor. Every other product on the market is discussed as a category — built-in operating system protection, free tiers, paid suites — and never by name. That is the honest description of a small publication that has not surveyed the market, and it is why you will not find a ranked list of ten products here.

It determines that a link exists. The paid links on the homepage, on the free-versus-paid guide and on the vendor profile are there because of the arrangement. They are labelled as paid links wherever they appear.

What the commission does not influence

• The order or content of comparisons. Our tables compare approaches — built-in protection, free products, paid subscriptions — rather than ranking vendors, and the vendor has no involvement in how they are constructed.
• Cautions and criticisms. The vendor profile is the most heavily qualified page on the site, and it exists to tell you what we cannot verify about the product we are paid to link to.
• The advice that you may not need to buy anything. Our guides say plainly that built-in protection is a defensible choice for many households, and that a backup is often a better use of the same money. That is against our commercial interest and it stays.
• Claims we will not make. We publish no prices, no test scores, no rankings and no performance claims, whether or not they would help the commercial arrangement.

No vendor reviews, approves, edits or sees any page on this site before publication.

How coverage is decided

Topics come from the questions readers send us and from the questions people obviously arrive with: whether built-in protection is enough, what the difference between free and paid actually is, why a subscription renewed unexpectedly, and what to do about an alarming pop-up. Those topics exist regardless of whether they lead anyone to a paid link, and most of them do not.

The site's stated scope is consumer desktop antivirus software for Windows, macOS and Linux, written for readers in Australia. Business and enterprise products and mobile applications are outside it. The full editorial method is on our about page.

How the links are built

The paid links on this site are plain HTML links pointing directly at the vendor's destination. They are marked with rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" so that search engines and browsers can identify them as paid, and they open in a new tab. There is no redirect through this domain, no script that changes a link's destination when you click it, and no tracking parameter added from your visit — you can hover over any of them and see in your browser's status bar exactly where it goes before you decide.

Arcadia Group receives no personal information from the referral process: not your name, your email address, your payment details or your account. We see only aggregate commercial reporting that identifies no individual. Our privacy policy describes a site that collects nothing at all.

Australian consumer law and disclosure

Under the Australian Consumer Law, misleading or deceptive conduct in trade or commerce is prohibited, and that obligation applies to a publisher making claims about products as much as to the business selling them. Advertising that is not clearly identifiable as advertising is one of the ways publishers fall foul of it. Our response is to disclose the arrangement in the upper part of the homepage, beside every paid link, and in full on this page — rather than in a line of small print at the bottom. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission publishes guidance for consumers and businesses at accc.gov.au.

If the arrangement changes

If we add a commercial relationship with another vendor, remove this one, or change the basis on which we are paid, this page will be updated to say so and the effective date at the top will change. If a page ever discusses a product we are not paid to link to, that will be stated on the page itself.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think a paid link somewhere on the site is not adequately labelled, write to info@arcadiagroup.online. Disclosure complaints are taken seriously and acted on, because the credibility of the whole site rests on this page being accurate.

Publisher: Human Protection s.r.o., Purkyňova 953, 250 82 Úvaly, Czech Republic. Company number 09160264. VAT CZ09160264.

Avast and all other product names, logos and brands mentioned on this site are the property of their respective owners. Arcadia Group is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them.