Methodology

Why this page exists

A lot of compliance content on the open web turns out, on close reading, to be recycled from a small set of wikis and press-release wires. The result is visible: regulator names long out of office, fine amounts off by an order of magnitude, "the court upheld the fine" written about cases where the court actually reduced it. Once such material is indexed, it propagates further.

klarproof exists to be a counterweight in a narrow domain — EU regulators and enforcement. The way we work with sources matters more than the writing. This page documents the standards every published post is held to.

Source whitelist

For every concrete fact in a post — a name, a date, a fine amount, a statute reference, the fate of a court case — we cite a primary source. In order of preference:

• Official regulator publications — press releases, decisions, leadership pages, annual reports of the regulator in question (aki.ee, tietosuoja.fi, cnil.fr, edpb.europa.eu, aesia.digital.gob.es, etc.).
• Official journals and legal databases — EUR-Lex for EU regulations and directives; Riigi Teataja, Finlex, Légifrance, Gesetze im Internet for national law.
• Court rulings — directly from court portals (kohus.ee, riigikohus.ee, curia.europa.eu, courtlistener.com, bailii.org).
• enforcementtracker.com — CMS Law's editorial registry of GDPR fines (this is editorial, not a wiki).
• Quality national press — editorial articles in err.ee, postimees.ee, yle.fi, hs.fi, lemonde.fr, faz.net, sueddeutsche.de, etc. Editorial content only — not company-press-release sections.
• Signed law-firm publications — analyses by named partners at large firms (Sorainen, DLA Piper, Bird & Bird, Covington's Global Policy Watch, Pinsent Masons, Norton Rose Fulbright). Not anonymous "insights" pieces.

Source blacklist

Some sources look authoritative at a glance but cannot be trusted as standalone confirmation. We do not cite them as proof of any concrete fact.

Wiki-style projects

Identifier: MediaWiki engine, "edit" button on the page, open list of contributors, no editorial verification before publication.

• Wikipedia (any language version) — explicitly self-described as "not a reliable source" in its own policies. Documented fabrications include the Seigenthaler hoax, the Bicholim conflict, Jar'Edo Wens.
• GDPRhub — a noyb-run MediaWiki project, self-described as "a free and open wiki that allows anyone to find, edit and share GDPR insights". Volunteer Country Reporters, no formal editorial chain.
• HandWiki, Wikia/Fandom and any other community-edited wiki — for the same reason.

Paid press-release wires

Identifier: companies pay to publish their own statements; "editorial review" only checks formal compliance of the submitted content, not editorial journalism; the wires get auto-indexed as "news" by search engines but the content is corporate self-publication.

• GlobeNewswire, Business Wire, PR Newswire, OTS, EQS-News — paid press-release distribution wires.
• Press-release sections of editorial outlets (e.g. kauppalehti.fi/porssitiedotteet/, Bloomberg "company-issued press releases") — brand-wrapped re-distribution of corporate releases.

Unofficial mirrors of official documents

Where an EU document has an official version on a Commission domain, we cite that, not a third-party mirror — even when the mirror is well-intentioned and accurate.

Two-stage fact-check

Every post goes through two passes, separated so that the second pass is not biased by the work done in the first.

Stage 1 — writing

1. For every high-risk claim — a name in office, a date in the format "D Month YYYY" or ISO, a fine amount in €, a statute number — the primary source is opened before the sentence is written.
2. The citation is placed as a hyperlink at the first mention of the fact in each H2 section. Repeats inside the same section stay as plain text — repeated identical links lose attention.
3. If a primary source cannot be found, the claim is not written. An empty sentence is preferable to a fabricated one.

Stage 2 — independent verification

Before publication, the post is independently re-checked by someone who did not write it. Each cited primary source is opened again and the claim is verified from scratch. Each claim is then categorised:

• Confirmed — the source supports the claim.
• Unconfirmed — the source is unreachable, ambiguous, or only available via a blacklisted outlet.
• Contradicted — the source says something different from what the post says.

The post does not publish if any claim is contradicted, or if confirmed coverage is below 90%. Unconfirmed claims are either re-checked manually until upgraded, removed, or softened to drop the disputed precision.

What happens after publication

Periodic re-check

Regulator profiles age fast — leadership rotates, statistics update annually. After roughly six months, each regulator profile is re-checked against current sources, with attention to leadership pages and the most recent annual report.

Erratum

If we publish something wrong and discover it later, the correction lands on our erratum page with the date and the nature of the fix — not silently overwritten. A public record of mistakes is the only honest counterweight to publishing facts in a field where "trust us" is meaningless.

Languages

The English version of every post is the master. The Russian mirror is updated in lockstep with the English original — facts must match. Verification is run on the English master; corrections are mirrored to the Russian version in the same change.

We do not publish into the other 22 EU languages because we cannot guarantee native-speaker review of the translation, and unverified machine-translated compliance content is a known SEO and reputational liability. Expansion to new languages will happen with native-speaker review, one language at a time, when bandwidth allows.

What this is not

This methodology does not make klarproof a substitute for legal counsel. We aim for primary-source accuracy on facts; we do not give legal advice. If you are about to make a compliance decision for a real organisation, talk to a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction.

Found a problem with our process?

Email info@klarproof.com. We treat every reported error as a procedural failure and look at how it slipped through, not just at fixing the specific fact.