So the "KYC-free" claim is misleading
Well... we've never observed them being non KYC-free to our users. And if they start doing that and the users go through their verification we'll compensate them for their trouble and loss of privacy straight from the exchange' coffers. It's not flawless, but if we only listed exchanges that will never check if your coins are tainted we'd only be able to list one and I suspect it's only a matter of time, before they too are forced to change their business model.
Can you share how they check that?
Unfortunately no, because there is no objective standard, just like you say it's entirely subjective. Anecdotally I have reason to believe stolen coins are considered tainted, but coins from DNMs are not, but that's just me connecting the dots from the things I hear, please don't rely on this observation.
Aside from the warning users an exchange might take their funds if they appear tainted we also warn users if an exchange is known to send tainted coins which then cause inconvenience when the user tries to spend them.
The notion of "taint" is very bad for Bitcoin.
I fully agree with you. However so long as Bitcoin's blockchain is transparent it is unavoidable. The only (admittedly partial) solution which comes to mind is the use of Bitcoin's Lightning Network of which I am a strong supported and actually before OrangeFren.com I spent my days creating tools for lnd professionally. For that reason OrangeFren.com does separate comparisons and collects separate rates from Lighting exchanges.
There's a flaw in your Untraceable Bitcoin with Monero
You're right! Thanks for letting me know! I'll go over the post and fix the error.
Your Disclaim affiliation is genius
Thank you! The website actually started off with that idea, however nobody ever used it. Recently I was actually planning on removing that feature entirely.