A method statement is only useful if it describes limits rather than virtues. This one is mostly limits. Beacon Hub is a small publication with a single commercial relationship and no testing capability, and everything below follows from those two facts.
What is in scope and what is not
In scope: how consumer security software works, what protection the major operating systems provide without additional purchase, how subscriptions in this category are priced and cancelled, what rights Australian consumers have when a purchase goes wrong, and which Australian bodies handle which kind of problem.
Out of scope: enterprise and business security products, comparative detection testing, malware analysis, incident response advice for a device that is already compromised, and any recommendation about which product a particular reader should buy. The last of these is worth spelling out. We cannot know your household, your devices or your risk, and a site with one paid relationship is not the right place to receive a personal recommendation from.
The honest statement of breadth
Beacon Hub covers one product commercially: TotalAV. We do not cover the rest of the market product by product, and we do not claim to. Where other products or platform tools are named, it is to describe how a mechanism works or what a platform includes, not to rank them against each other. A comparison table on this site compares approaches, never vendors.
The sources we use
Four kinds of source, in descending order of weight.
- Australian government and regulator publications
- The Australian Cyber Security Centre for security guidance, Scamwatch and the National Anti-Scam Centre for current scam approaches, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner for privacy and data breach matters, the ACCC for consumer law, and the eSafety Commissioner for online safety. These are linked rather than paraphrased wherever a claim rests on them.
- Platform vendor documentation
- What Microsoft, Apple and Google publish about the protection built into their own operating systems. This is the authoritative account of what those systems do, and it is where our platform descriptions come from.
- Vendor material for the product we link to
- Feature descriptions, supported platforms and terms as the vendor publishes them. We treat these as the vendor's statements, attribute them that way, and never present them as findings of ours.
- Our own reasoning
- The trade-offs, the decision framing and the judgements about who a route suits. This is opinion, it is written as opinion, and it is the part you should argue with.
What we refuse to do
- No invented testing. We have not run detection tests and we publish no detection figures, no performance benchmarks and no scores. If you see a percentage on this site, it will have a named external source attached to it.
- No borrowed laboratory results. Independent testing organisations publish real comparative results. Those belong to them, go stale quickly, and reprinting them under our own heading would imply work we did not do. Read them at the source.
- No people who do not exist. There are no author personas on this site, no invented analysts, no staff photographs and no biographies. Pages are written by the Beacon Hub editorial team on behalf of the publisher named in the footer, and that is the whole of the authorship claim.
- No testimonials or ratings. No reader quotes, no star ratings, no "users say". We have not collected any, and fabricating them is the most common form of dishonesty in this vertical.
- No urgency. No countdowns, no expiring offers, no stock counters, no alarm about the state of your device. A page in a browser cannot know anything about your device's security, and we will not imply that it can.
- No data collection. The site has no forms, no newsletter, no analytics and no cookies. There is nothing to opt into and nothing being gathered about you while you read.
How the commercial relationship works
When a reader follows our link to TotalAV and takes out a subscription, the merchant running that affiliate programme pays Beacon Hub a fixed commission. We are paid by the merchant, not by the reader. The reader pays whatever the vendor charges at checkout; the commission is deducted from the vendor's own margin, and the price is not increased to fund it.
Beacon Hub is not a reseller, an agent, a partner or an authorised distributor of TotalAV, and has no ability to affect your account, your subscription, your billing or your refund. Those are entirely between you and the vendor. We have no role in the transaction beyond the referral itself, and we are not told who follows a link.
Every page carrying that link carries a disclosure line immediately beside it, and the disclosure page restates the arrangement in full.
How coverage order is decided
Pages are ordered to answer the reader's question in the order it arises, which on this site means platform protection first and paid products later. That order is editorial, and it is deliberately the opposite of the order that would maximise commission: the first substantive recommendation on the review page is to check what you already have before buying anything.
Within a page, options are grouped by which household they suit rather than ranked best to worst. We publish no scores, so there is no ranking to be influenced. The commission influences which product is linked — there is only one, and it is the one we are paid for — and that is the beginning and end of its influence on this site.
How claims are worded
Three rules govern the wording, and they exist because misleading conduct in trade is enforceable against the publisher under the Australian Consumer Law, not only against the advertiser.
- A factual claim carries its source in the same sentence. If we cannot link the body that says it, the sentence is rewritten as general guidance or removed.
- Vendor claims are attributed to the vendor. "The vendor states" is not hedging; it is an accurate description of where the information came from and who is answerable for it.
- No superlatives and no absolutes. Nothing here is described as the best, the most secure, guaranteed, complete or total protection. No security product delivers any of those, and claiming otherwise would be both wrong and actionable.
When pages are updated
The site is rewritten once a year as a dated edition; the current one was last reviewed on 16 September 2026 and every page carries that date in its footer. Between editions we make corrections whenever something is found to be wrong, and we update where a platform changes materially or a government source moves. A correction that changes the meaning of a page is noted on that page rather than made silently.
Prices are not updated, because no price is published here in the first place. That is the simplest way to avoid a figure going stale and becoming misleading.
Corrections and complaints
If something here is inaccurate, tell us and we will fix it or remove it. Email info@beaconhub.online with the page address and what is wrong; a correction that we accept is made at the source rather than argued about. The publisher's full legal details are in the footer of every page and on the contact page.
Complaints about a product, a charge or a subscription belong with the vendor first. If that does not resolve it, Australian consumers can raise the matter with the ACCC at accc.gov.au or with their state or territory consumer affairs body. Privacy complaints go to the OAIC.