How this site is written

Why this page exists

Online safety advice is worth very little if you cannot tell where it came from or how current it is. This page sets out how the material on cyberhygiene.tools is produced, checked, and corrected, so you can judge it for yourself.

Who writes it

cyberhygiene.tools is an independent project built and maintained in New Zealand by a small team. It is not owned by a security vendor. We do not accept payment for coverage, and no company has any say over what appears here.

We do offer paid hands-on sessions in New Zealand, and you should know that when you read us. It changes nothing about the advice: everything we do in a paid session is already explained for free on this site, we hold nothing back, and we do not promote the services inside articles or tool pages. We sell no software, take no commission and have no affiliate arrangements, so there is no product we have an interest in recommending.

We are not a government agency, a law enforcement body, or a scam recovery service, and we do not present ourselves as any of those. Where something needs a professional — the police, your bank, a regulator, a lawyer — we say so and point you to them rather than trying to handle it ourselves.

How the content is produced

• Everything is written for this site. Articles are not spun, rewritten or assembled from other publications. Where we draw on published guidance, we describe it in our own words and say where the idea comes from.
• We check against recognised sources. Guidance from national cyber security agencies and consumer protection bodies is our reference point, including CERT NZ and Netsafe in New Zealand and their equivalents elsewhere.
• We prefer practical over comprehensive. An article listing thirty things nobody will do is worse than one listing five things people actually do. We order advice by what prevents the most real harm.
• We say when advice has changed. A good deal of standard security advice has aged badly — forced password rotation, judging scams by spelling, treating the padlock icon as proof of safety. Where we disagree with familiar advice, we explain why rather than quietly omitting it.
• We avoid fear as a technique. Frightening people produces anxiety, not better habits. We aim for calm and specific.

Dates and reviews

Guides carry the date they were last reviewed. We revisit pages when national guidance changes, when a scam pattern shifts, or when a reader tells us something is out of date. Pages that describe specific scams get checked more often than pages describing fundamentals, because the fundamentals move slowly.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather fix it than defend it. Email contact@cyberhygiene.tools with the page and the problem. Substantive corrections are made to the page itself and the review date is updated.

This includes the country-specific reporting contacts, which change from time to time. If a number or agency listed on our reporting page is no longer correct for your country, telling us helps everybody who reads it after you.

How the site makes money

cyberhygiene.tools is free and is funded by display advertising. We do not sell user data, we do not run affiliate links inside our safety advice, and advertisers have no influence over what we write or which products we do or do not mention.

Advertising is kept out of the way of the content rather than woven through it. If you ever see an advert on this site that itself looks like a scam, please report it to us — we would rather lose the revenue than host it.

Privacy in the tools themselves

Every tool on this site runs entirely in your browser. Passwords, links, email text and quiz answers are processed on your own device and are never transmitted to a server, logged, or stored. There is no user database because there are no user accounts.

You can verify this: load any tool, disconnect from the internet, and it will keep working. Advertising and analytics scripts do run on the site, as on most of the web, and the cookies associated with them are not set until you accept them. The privacy policy has the full detail.

What we will not publish

• Instructions that would help somebody carry out fraud rather than avoid it.
• Scare stories without practical advice attached.
• Claims that any tool, product or habit makes anyone immune.
• Content aimed at children that collects personal information, enables contact between users, or requires an account.

The children's games on this site have no chat, no messaging, no sign-up and no personal data collection. The optional leaderboard records a nickname and a score, and nothing else.