Privacy Policy

PayScale is a crowdsourced salary-transparency platform for professionals across Africa. This policy explains what we collect, how salary submissions are kept separate from your identity, and what is — and isn't — shown publicly.

• Account data: your email address and a password that is stored only as a bcrypt hash (never in plain text). To keep you signed in we issue an opaque session token (30-day expiry), which we store only as a SHA-256 hash.
• Salary submissions: the compensation fields you enter — company, role, level, country, city, currency, base, bonus, equity, years of experience, and remote status — plus a one-way "submitter hash" used purely to prevent duplicate submissions of the same role at the same company.
• Basic server logs: standard technical information (such as request metadata) generated when you use the service, used for security and reliability.

A salary submission is never linked to your account. We do not store your user ID, email, or any account reference alongside the salary row.

The only connection point is the submitter hash — a one-way HMAC-SHA256 fingerprint derived from your account together with the company and role. It exists solely to detect duplicate submissions and cannot be reversed to recover your identity or email.

Only coarsened, generalized data is ever displayed. We never publish your email, identity, exact city, or exact figures. Specifically:

• Compensation is rounded to the nearest 1,000.
• Years of experience are shown as bands (0–2, 3–5, 6–8, 9–12, 13+).
• Location is shown as country only; the city you enter is never displayed.
• Submission dates are shown as month and year only.

Because the data is small and crowdsourced, please share only what you're comfortable making public — with very few submissions for a given role, re-identification risk is lower but not zero.

To keep you signed in, your session/auth token is stored in your browser's local storage. Clearing your browser storage or signing out removes it. We do not use third-party advertising or tracking cookies.

We keep account and submission data for as long as the service operates and the data remains useful for benchmarking.

To be transparent: self-service account or data deletion is not a built feature yet. If you'd like your account removed or have questions about your data, contact us at info@getpayscale.com and we'll help. Note that because submissions are de-identified and unlinkable to accounts, individual salary rows generally cannot be traced back to a specific person to remove.

We do not sell or rent your personal information. Salary data exists to be shared as anonymous, aggregate benchmarks — that is the whole point of the platform.

PayScale is intended for adults aged 18 or older. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

We may update this policy as the platform evolves. When we do, we'll revise the "Last updated" date above. Significant changes will be communicated where practical.

Questions about privacy? Reach us at info@getpayscale.com.

This document is a template provided for general information only and is not legal advice. Please consult a qualified professional before relying on it.