Why our guides don't mention Seldeo
If you read our guide on recognising social engineering, or the one on responding to online harassment, you will notice something missing: us.
There is no closing pitch. No "and of course, Seldeo protects you from this." Most of the advice applies to accounts you hold somewhere else entirely, and some of it is about problems our product does not touch at all.
People have asked why. The short answer is that a guide written to sell something is a worse guide, and readers can tell.
Advice with a product attached is compromised advice
The moment a piece of writing has to arrive at a conclusion, the analysis bends toward it. Not usually through dishonesty — through emphasis. Risks the product happens to address get more space. Risks it does not address get less. Alternatives that work better go unmentioned.
The reader is then in the difficult position of trying to separate the useful information from the argument it is wrapped in, usually while worried about something. Someone whose account has just been compromised, or who has just found their address posted publicly, does not need to perform that filtering. They need the sequence of steps, in order, with the unhelpful parts left out.
So the guides are written to a simple rule: the reader should be better off after reading it whether or not they ever use our product.
This means our security guide recommends hardware security keys and password managers we have no relationship with. Our data rights guide explains how to make a request to any company, including ours. Our digital legacy guide points at the legacy tools that other platforms provide, because those tools are the reliable option and pretending otherwise would be a disservice to someone planning for their family.
The obvious objection
There is a reasonable criticism here: writing useful things and publishing them under a company name is still marketing. Nobody does this purely out of civic feeling, and we are not going to claim we do.
The distinction we would draw is about what the writing is optimised for. A piece optimised for conversion answers the question how do we get this reader to sign up. A piece optimised for usefulness answers what does this person need to know. The second one produces goodwill more slowly and less measurably. It also produces something worth linking to, which the first one generally does not.
We are content for the benefit to be indirect. If someone reads the harassment guide, does the documentation properly, and gets a result — and never thinks about us again — that is a fine outcome.
What this means in practice
A few operating rules follow from it.
Every guide is signed by a named person. Not "the team", not an unattributed house voice. The people who write here are listed with their roles and what they work on, and their names are on the work. Attribution is the cheapest accountability mechanism available, and unsigned advice is worth less because nobody has staked anything on it.
We separate product documentation from independent guidance. Help articles explain how our features work — they are supposed to be about the product, and they say so. Guides explain a topic. When a guide does mention us, it is because the alternative would be a conspicuous omission.
We say when something is uncertain. A good deal of what gets written about online safety is stated with more confidence than the underlying evidence supports. Where research is contested — much of the screen-time literature, for example — we say it is contested rather than picking the finding that makes a tidier paragraph.
We correct things in public. Our editorial policy sets out how corrections are handled and how the writing is sourced. A correction that is made silently is not a correction; it is a revision of the record.
The part we find genuinely difficult
Writing about safety involves a tension we have not fully resolved.
Detailed explanations of how attacks work are useful to the people defending against them, and also, unavoidably, to the people carrying them out. We generally come down on the side of explaining the mechanism, because the attackers already know it and the defenders are the ones being kept in the dark by vague advice. But it is a judgement call each time, and we do sometimes leave out specifics.
Similarly: writing plainly about grief, harassment, and death means writing about things that are painful to read. Softening the language would make the pages more comfortable and less useful to the person who actually needs them at two in the morning.
We would rather be useful at two in the morning.