1. Introduction
AusCorp Vault ("we", "us", or "our"), operated by The Aussie Corporate, handles your information in accordance with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). This policy explains, as plainly and specifically as we can, what we collect, where it lives, how long we keep it, and what happens when you ask us to delete it.
2. Information We Collect
We collect the following types of information to provide salary benchmarking:
- Employment details: Job title, seniority level, practice area, employment type, years of experience, and your employer's name, which the survey requires
- Compensation data: Base salary, superannuation, bonuses, equity, and total compensation
- Location and work pattern: City of employment, hours worked, work-from-home days, and your commute
- How your workplace works: How you rate your manager, how recognised your work is, how clear your path to the next step is, whether it feels safe to raise a concern, and whether you feel you belong. These are part of the culture survey, which is separate from the pay survey and which you choose to start.
- Wellbeing, only with your say-so: Stress, burnout, whether your workload is sustainable, how easy leave is to take, and how easily you switch off. We ask first whether we can ask at all, and each scale can be left blank.
- Gender, if you choose to give it: Asked so we can measure the gender pay gap, with a "prefer not to say" option, and it can be skipped
- Anything you type in a free-text box: Comments, a team or category we did not list, and the short "what is it like here" note on a company profile. The survey ones are never published; the company-profile one is published only after a person reviews it, and we strip out contact details and names before it is stored.
- Employee Benefits Survey, if you take it: Which benefits your employer offers and what they are worth, the trade-offs you would make for them, how your workplace handles leave and flexible work, whether you were told no or discouraged when you asked for it, how often you are expected to reply outside working hours, your area of work, level, city, employment type and time at the employer, your age band, caring situation and gender only if you give them, and your email only if you give it at the end. Your answers save as you go, so we keep what you answered even if you stop before the end. Anything you type there is never published.
- Account contact: Email address for sign-in, benchmark retrieval, and updates, if you create an account or opt in
- Newsletter sign-up, if you use it: The email address you type into a newsletter box goes to The Aussie Corporate's newsletters, Flat White and Pick & Scroll. It is never linked to your salary submission or your account.
- Technical anti-spam signals: A one-way scrambled (hashed) version of your submitting IP address, and a similar hashed device marker, both used only to catch duplicate or spam submissions. We never store your actual IP address.
We do NOT collect: Your name, employee ID, client names, or any other direct identifier.
3. How We Use Your Information
Your information is used to:
- Generate your personalised salary benchmark
- Contribute to aggregated, privacy-protected market statistics
- Send you benchmark updates (only if you opted in)
- Improve the accuracy and coverage of our benchmarking data
4. Anonymity & Data Protection
🔒 Your anonymity is our priority
Every statistic we publish, whether it is a market benchmark or a company pay range, is built from at least 5 people's data before we show it. We never publish exact individual figures, and we never show the number of responses behind a statistic. This includes the personal comparison on your own results page: every comparison uses at least 5 people. When your exact group has fewer, you are compared with a wider group instead, and your exact group shows as pending until more data arrives.
Your data is stored securely using industry-standard encryption. If you give us an email address (for account access, a requested report, or alerts), it is stored with your submission for those purposes only. It is kept separate from published outputs and is never shown in public benchmarks or to employers.
5. Disclosure of Information
We do not share your individual data. Only aggregated, anonymised statistics may be shared:
- Market benchmarks: Combined data from at least 5 people, shown as ranges or medians. Individual responses are never shown.
- Company-level aggregates: We publish a company's pay as rounded ranges per role group, and only once that group meets the same minimum of 5 people. Policy and rating summaries are shown only where they cannot identify individuals. We never display the number of responses behind a figure. Smaller groups stay hidden until more data arrives. One exception: in the benefits survey, the next person from your employer usually sees the benefits we already hold for it, ticked, so they can confirm or correct them. That shows what the employer offers, never who told us, and it can come from one person's answer. We may also tick benefits an employer publishes itself, such as on its careers page.
- Service providers: Supabase (database and sign-in), Vercel (hosting), and Resend (sending emails) all process data on our behalf to run the service. If you use employer-side paid features, Stripe processes that payment; it never sees consumer survey data. Tally runs the benefits survey form and keeps its answers on our behalf, encrypted and stored in the European Union. None of these providers can see your name, and none receive your salary figure linked to your email address.
- Newsletters: If you sign up to The Aussie Corporate's newsletters, your email address goes to beehiiv, which sends them. beehiiv receives nothing from your salary submission, and every newsletter has an unsubscribe link.
- Legal requirements: If required by Australian law or court order
We never sell your data, and we never hand an employer your individual submission, your identity, or a figure small enough to point back to one person.
6. Your Rights
Under Australian Privacy Principles, you have the right to:
- Access any personal information we hold about you. Your own submissions are visible in your account dashboard; for anything else, email us and we will respond within a reasonable time.
- Request correction of inaccurate information
- Opt out of marketing emails at any time. Every optional email we send carries an unsubscribe link, which can stop that one category, that whole audience, or every optional email at once. The monthly digest can also be switched off in your account settings. None of this affects account-critical emails, like a sign-in code or a deletion confirmation.
- Delete your account, from the account settings page. See section 7 for exactly what this does and does not remove.
- Lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC)
7. How Long We Keep Data, and What Deletion Actually Does
We do not currently delete data automatically after a set period. Your raw submission and account details are kept until you ask us to remove them, or indefinitely if you don't.
From your account, you can request one of two kinds of deletion, both starting a 7-day grace period so a mistaken request can be cancelled before it runs:
- Full deletion: Your account, your raw submission record, your emails, and your alerts are permanently removed from our systems.
- Anonymise instead: Your account is stripped of your email and identifying details and disconnected from sign-in, but kept as an anonymous record.
What deletion does not remove: the anonymised compensation data point your submission contributed to our benchmarking dataset stays in that dataset, so the aggregate statistics it helped build remain accurate for everyone else. Either type of deletion disconnects that data point from your account. It was never published or shown on its own, only ever blended into a statistic covering at least 5 people, and it never carried your name.
Benefits survey answers: if you give your email at the end, we link your answers to the AusCorp Vault account with that email, and to its salary answers, once you sign in with it. If you go on to the salary survey in the same browser tab, we link that salary answer to your benefits answers. Otherwise they are not linked to an account. Deleting your AusCorp Vault account does not delete them. To have yours deleted, email us the reference shown when you finished or the email you gave, or, if you stopped part way, your employer, the day and one of your answers. We delete them from our systems and from Tally.
Corrections and duplicates: if you submit a corrected figure, or our systems detect a duplicate, we keep the older version on file rather than erasing it, but it is immediately excluded from every benchmark and never shown again. We also keep routine backup copies of our database for disaster recovery, which may briefly retain a snapshot of data you asked us to delete until that backup is naturally cycled out.
8. Cookies & Analytics
We use essential cookies to keep you signed in and to maintain your session while completing the survey.
We use PostHog to understand how the site is used (page views, clicks, and similar behaviour). A small, random sample of visits (around 1 in 10) also records a session replay for debugging and design research; every replay masks all on-screen text and form inputs, so it never captures a salary figure, an email address, or anything you typed. Any link containing your personal benchmark token is stripped out before analytics events are sent, so that token never leaves your browser.
We also use Sentry so we are told when something breaks. When a page hits an error, Sentry keeps a recording of that visit to help us fix it, with all on-screen text and form inputs masked. You can block or clear cookies and analytics scripts in your browser settings at any time; the site will still work, though we may not detect problems you run into as quickly.
9. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be notified on our website. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.
10. Contact Us
For privacy-related enquiries or to exercise your rights, please contact us:
Email: vault@theaussiecorporate.com
We are working on adding a postal address here for formal written correspondence. Until then, email is the fastest and most reliable way to reach us.