{
  "version": "editorial-1",
  "as_of": "2026-11-07",
  "scope": "Provisional provider-level editorial consensus from published overall review ratings. This is not an exact-plan score, a security assessment, or a meta-analysis of comparable tests.",
  "normalization": "100 × (value − original worst) / (original best − original worst)",
  "family_weighting": "Keep one eligible edition per publication; average normalized publication ratings within each known publisher family, then give every contributing family one equal share. Merge families if an explicit shared origin is recorded.",
  "minimum_families": 2,
  "maximum_article_age_months": 36,
  "date_basis": "Latest captured article modified date, otherwise publication date; never substituted for an actual test date. The cutoff is applied to the dated review edition, without a recency bonus or score penalty.",
  "rounding": "Round only the final mean to the nearest whole point, with half points rounded up. Retain unrounded family means and normalized inputs in the export.",
  "coverage_labels": {
    "two_families": "Limited coverage",
    "three_or_more_families": "Broader coverage"
  },
  "disagreement_threshold_points": 15,
  "excluded_inputs": [
    "Category-only scores, including RTINGS Private Browsing",
    "Customer or app-store ratings",
    "Explicitly mixed free/premium verdicts and free-only verdicts",
    "Missing, invalid or out-of-bounds overall scales",
    "Undated, future-dated or older-than-36-month review editions",
    "Duplicate editions from one publication",
    "Held speed snapshots, policy statements, audits, country groups and court records",
    "Source captures dated after the fixed calculation snapshot, until the policy date is deliberately advanced"
  ],
  "limitations": [
    "Publishers use different criteria; scale conversion does not harmonize their methods.",
    "Exact tested plan, platform and test window can be unknown for included provider-level opinions. Those gaps still prevent treating them as comparable test evidence.",
    "Family grouping is provisional and does not certify independent measurements or exclude all undisclosed data reuse.",
    "Most included publishers use affiliate links or advertising. Top10VPN's terms also disclose possible commercial influence on comparison ordering and scores.",
    "Observed source range describes disagreement among included normalized publisher ratings, not a confidence interval, reliability probability or expected outcome for a visitor.",
    "Commission amounts, current VPN prices, ownership preferences and missing records do not change the weights or contribute points.",
    "Publisher overall verdicts can already reflect their own speed, privacy and value judgments. We do not add separate points for our speed snapshots, case files or current prices."
  ]
}