Watching this comment tick down with more and more downvotes from people who get paid cushy software engineer salaries is absolutely comical.
But, I went on Consumer Reports recently looking for a good smoke detector and saw they are now using affiliate links for the products they test as well, and I consider them well established and above board. So, everyone will have to make their own ethical judgment on how to take the results.
Summary, the samurai passed all their standard rollover tests and got great remarks from the test drivers about its handling and maneuverability. So they changed the test specifically to make it fail, and kept trying until it failed. Then they presented that failure as happening under normal conditions, singled out the samurai by name, and said it easily rolled in cornering despite their own testing showing it was actually quite difficult to make it roll.
As a result, Suzuki and Isuzu both left the usdm. Today, the Suzuki Jimny is one of the most popular SUVs in the world and America can't have it because consumer reports lied deliberately to American consumers.
This is slightly unrelated, but I remember in the 2000s, there was a vendor of protein powders who started testing his and other vendors protein powders to see if their labels were true & they weren't protein spiking (adding cheaper collagen instead of whey lying on the labels, essentially). He almost immediately got sued from several large mfgs and had to shut down.
So, for this group, and the fact that they're ignoring cease & desist letters from the toothpaste mfgs they're testing puts them in HUGE legal risk, I suspect, and would not be the least bit surprised if all the funds they're collecting are going to end up in lawyers pockets.
My dude, what do you think those affiliate links are?