What does 'anti-triangulation' mean, and why does it matter?
Triangulation is the ability to infer who someone is — or what they said — by combining a few partial facts that are individually harmless.
Even when names are hidden, small clues like timing, order, or who was invited can be enough to reconstruct the answer.
This risks is strong with tools that aren't specifically oriented at creating an anti-triangulation blur, the way Salary Confidential is. In a Google Form, for example, and even if data is collected anonymously, it remains that the owner of the form is sitting on the other side of the spreadsheet which collects results and they see these results as they come in.
A concrete example:
You invite Anna as the first (and only) participant on Monday. You invite Lee on Thursday. When you look at the data, you notice there is a timestamp saying when each response came in. You notice that one timestamp says this response was collected on Wednesday. The other response was collected on Friday.
Even though responses are anonymous, you can infer that the Wednesday response must have come from Anna, because she is the only one who even had access to the survey then; and then the Friday response must be Lee
That inference is triangulation. No technical breach occurred — but anonymity was still effectively broken.
Anonymity can fail even when privacy systems are working exactly as designed. So we're extra cautious about what or when or how you get access to your data, to prevent humans from using seemingly harmless context to break anonymity
Why it matters
Compensation is sensitive information, and professional communities are small. Even unintentional hints — a highly specific salary number or a timestamp close to a known interaction — can compromise anonymity.
By enforcing anti-triangulation throughout the data lifecycle — not just at the release threshold but in data structure and access rules — Salary Confidential preserves the trust that makes peers willing to contribute in the first place.
All about the way the Salary Confidential is built for Privacy by Construction
Salary Confidential is unique in the systematic approach we've taken to how we collect, release and present our survey data to keep the data useful and precise (because the peer set is intentionally very narrow), without exposing the identity of respondents even when the requester knows exactly who they have invited