What is a 'Trust Circle'?

A Trust Circle is an optional feature that allows Respondents who participated in a peer group survey to get connected with each other after the survey is complete.
It’s designed for professional networking, not for sharing salary data.

How it works

• When submitting a peer group survey response, you can choose to share a contact email for Trust Circle purposes.
• Trust Circles are all-or-nothing: either all participants opted in (and the Circle is formed) or at least one didn’t (and no circle is formed).
• Once the survey is closed and the report is released, you’ll see a green Trust Circle flag if the feature unlocked.
• For privacy, the peer group’s contact list isn’t shown directly in the survey report. Instead, enter the same email you gave us when you opt-ed in to this survey's Trust Circle, and we’ll send the list of your peers directly to that address.

No one is automatically included; joining requires explicit opt-in.

Privacy implications and data security

Participation in a Trust Circle does not affect anonymity in Survey results.

We’ve taken specific measures to protect Trust Circle information from unauthorized access or leaks:

• The email address and LinkedIn profile information you provide as a respondent are encrypted before being stored in our database. This means that even if our database was compromised, your compensation data would not be directly recognizable as being associated with you.
• We only briefly decrypt this information when verifying that you are a member of a Trust Circle and therefore eligible to receive the Trust Circle participant email, and when preparing the outbound email payload for our mailer.
• Our mailer never receives information about the underlying survey or any compensation data. It only receives an email address to send to, along with the list of LinkedIn profiles associated with that Trust Circle.
• This means that even if mailer logs were compromised, they could not be meaningfully reconstructed with database information to identify which LinkedIn profile was associated with a specific compensation response.

If you forget which email address you used for the Trust Circle, we cannot bypass this verification process. The Trust Circle email contains other participants’ information, not just your own, and we therefore apply stricter access controls than we do for standard survey corrections or deletions that affect only your own submitted data.

What is not part of the Trust Circle feature

• You will never see any connection between Trust Circle data and the actual compensation dataset.

• The Requester is not automatically included for being the requester. However, if the requester decided to submit their own data as a respondent (which they can do, of course - depending on the benchmark the respondent may be a logical peer of the group), then they may be part of the Trust Circle just like any other respondent.

So if a Trust Circle forms for your survey, and when you receive the list by email, you may find that your requester's LinkedIn profile is there among the peer list: It means their data is part of the survey peer group report. If the requester didn't participate as a peer, then they are not part of the Trust Circle.

But since you, as a group of respondent peer, do know who invited you, (via LinkedIn or email), you can certainly decide whether you want to reach out and include them in your discussions.

We designed the rules of Trust Circle inclusion around the idea only proven data participants had put 'skin in the game'. Unless the requester participates as a peer, they are a social peer, but not a peer of the survey data.