Editorial policy

These are commitments, not aspirations. Each one is specific enough that you could catch us breaking it, which is the only kind of editorial policy worth publishing. Where a rule affects what you see on a page, we have said which page.

Independence

Sensor & Latch is funded entirely by affiliate commissions, described in full in our affiliate disclosure. That is the only money that reaches this site, and the following are absolute:

• No paid placements. No brand, retailer or agency has ever paid to appear on this site, and none can. There is no rate card, because there is nothing to sell.
• No sponsored picks.We do not publish sponsored posts, advertorial, “partner content,” or paid inclusion in a roundup. If we ever did, it would be labeled at the top of the page in the same size type as the headline.
• No free units. We do not accept review samples, loaners, gifts, travel, or hardware of any kind from manufacturers or PR agencies. Since we do not test hardware, there is nothing a sample could legitimately be used for — it would only be an obligation.
• No brand has ever seen a page before publication.We do not send drafts, embargoed copy, or fact-check requests to manufacturers, and we do not give anyone the chance to soften a “Skip this if” line before readers see it.
• No commission input into rankings. Commission rates are not a scoring metric, not a tiebreaker, and not visible to the person writing the page.
• No monitoring leads. We do not sell your details to alarm companies and we have no monitoring partner. When the right answer is a monitored system, we can say so freely, because we earn nothing either way.

The rules we bind ourselves to

Every page on this site is written by Stephen V. and published under the same six rules.

1. No claimed testing. We have not tested this hardware, do not own it, and have not installed it. No page here describes handling a product, living with one, or putting one through a bench procedure, and none reports a count of units we put through anything — the honest number is zero and we state it in those terms on our methodology page rather than hiding it.
2. No fabricated reviews or testimonials. This is a new site with no customers. There is nothing to quote, so nothing is quoted. Invented praise is the single easiest thing to fake and the single hardest thing to come back from.
3. No invented prices, ratings or review counts.Prices come live from Amazon's API with the date they were checked, and when the data goes stale the number is removed rather than shown. We never type a price into prose or a table.
4. Every product claim traces to a linked public document.A manufacturer's manual or spec sheet, a published standard such as a BHMA/ANSI grade or a Matter or Thread certification, a vendor's own pricing page, or an FCC filing. Another review site's claim restated as fact is not a source, and neither is a retailer's marketing bullet.
5. Missing data is shown as missing.Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure, the cell reads “Not published.” Never a zero, never a dash that could be read as a zero, never an estimate presented as a spec.
6. Capability language matches capability. A contact sensor reports that a door opened; it does not stop anything. Where life safety is genuinely at stake — fire, carbon monoxide, a medical alert — we say plainly that a monitored system may be the right answer, even though we earn nothing from one.

We also do not use fear to sell hardware. No break-in narratives, no sirens, no invitation to picture the worst night of your life. Readers arrive at these pages with a specific technical question and we answer that question.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. Manufacturers revise spec sheets without notice, quietly swap radios inside a product with the same model number, and change what a plan includes. Our policy is about what happens next.

• We correct in place, and we say so. A factual correction is made on the page itself and carries a dated changelog line describing what changed. We do not silently edit a fact and re-date the page as though nothing happened.
• A correction that changes a ranking changes the ranking. If a corrected spec means a product should no longer be the top pick, we move it, note the change, and update the reasoning. We do not leave a winner in place because the page is performing.
• Anyone can report an error. Readers, manufacturers and competitors alike. We do not require you to identify yourself and we do not treat a correction from a brand differently from one from a reader — but a correction from a brand still has to come with the document.
• Typos and clarity edits are not corrections. Fixing a comma does not get a changelog line. Changing a number, a compatibility claim, a grade or a recommendation always does.
• Removal beats patching. If a claim cannot be re-sourced, it comes off the page. We would rather publish a shorter page than a page with an unverifiable sentence in it.

Update cadence

Stale pages are the standing failure of this category — it is normal to find a top-ranking “best of” article recommending hardware that has been discontinued for a year. These are the intervals we hold ourselves to.

Every page displays both a published date and a last-updated date. A re-dated page means someone opened the source documents again — we do not touch a date to make a page look fresh.

How we handle a product we got wrong

If a product we recommended turns out to have a documented problem — a security advisory, a recall, a firmware change that removes local storage or puts a previously free feature behind a plan — we do four things, in this order: add a warning to the page, re-run the selection criteriafor that page, move or remove the product according to what the criteria now say, and record the change in the page's changelog with the date and the source. We do not quietly delete the product and pretend we never picked it.

Sources and citation

Roundups, comparisons, reviews and data pages carry a sources block at the foot listing every document behind the page, with the date it was accessed. Inline links sit on the claim itself wherever the claim is specific. The full source hierarchy — which document type is acceptable for which spec — is published on our methodology page.

Structured data

Our markup does not claim what our writing refuses to claim. Because we do not test hardware, no review rating, star rating or aggregate rating appears in this site's structured data anywhere — the on-page scores are ordinary editorial content compiled from published documents, and they are never fed to search engines as if they were verified review scores.

Contact

Editorial questions, corrections and complaints: info@sensorandlatch.com. More about who runs the site is on the about page, and how the site is funded is on the affiliate disclosure.