Trust Circles
Connect with survey respondents while maintaining privacy and security
When we designed Salary Confidential, we centered our product design on the needs of our poll creators: they are entering complicated compensation conversations, and are hoping select groups of peers may provide some important, transparent data that could help solidify the ground on which they will stand.
But what about our respondents?
Our assumption is that our respondents are people who are generally interested in having conversations about compensation, whether their own or perhaps they also manage a team and have to hire others. Peers who respond to a Salary Confidential survey may therefore want to be in contact to discuss these topics.
Trust Circle feature
Trust Circle is our feature for respondents: You've signaled you were willing to speak transparently about compensation, and by definition our surveys are meant to sample across peer groups. If all the respondents in a survey peer groups all agree to reveal their identity by sharing their LinkedIn profile alongside (but not connected to!) their compensation data, then we will show the identity of all respondents to their fellow respondents when the survey is complete and results become available.
Trust Circle only unlocks if all opt-in. If even one respondent doesn't opt-in, then the feature never unlocks.
What about your privacy?
Private results pages
Survey result pages are private: when you submit data into a survey, our platform gives you a unique private key, which you will need to unlock the results page (the results page is available by returning to the original survey page, which will prompt you to provide your key to see results).
Double protection
Furthermore, even if one of the respondents shares the results page publicly (with their private key), the Trust Circle information is actually not present on the page. To unlock it, you will have to enter the Trust Circle email address you gave as a respondent when you opted in. You'll get the list of Trust Circle members at this email address, which means only Trust Circle participants can receive the list even if the survey peer group report gets shared.
Technical security for your personal identifiers
Trust Circle contact and LinkedIn details are encrypted in transit and at rest. We do not store them in readable plaintext in our database, and we only decrypt them briefly in memory when verifying a participating respondent and preparing the Trust Circle peer list.
This means that even if the database was compromised, your compensation information is not traceable to you through your Trust Circle contact details. The email system only receives the recipient email address and the LinkedIn profile list needed to send the Trust Circle message. It does not receive the survey response data or compensation records connected to that Trust Circle.
Important: survey owner limitations
The survey owner knows who they invited to a survey peer group, but they are not automatically a Trust Circle participant. Only if the survey owner participates as a respondent, which they can of course do if they have one useful data point for the group, can they opt into the Trust Circle. The principle for inclusion is that only peer group data participants can opt into this degree of connection.
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