Privacy Policy

1. Using the site — no account, no email required

You can use the pay calculator, FIRE calculator, salary pages, and blog without creating an account or giving us any personal information. Salary and income figures you type into our calculators are processed in your browser and are not stored on our servers or linked to you.

Pay Lens is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Seek, LinkedIn, or any other job board or recruitment platform.

2. Salary alerts and newsletter (only if you sign up)

If you subscribe to salary alerts or our monthly report, we collect:

• your email address;
• your alert preferences — role, city, and minimum pay range (if you set one);
• timestamps of signup and confirmation.

We use this information for one purpose: sending you the emails you asked for. Specifically:

• Double opt-in. We send a confirmation email first and never add you to any list until you click it.
• One short weekly email. Salary alerts arrive as a single weekly digest of matching jobs — and only in weeks where there is something to show. We do not email you when there are no matches.
• Unsubscribe anytime. Every email contains a one-click unsubscribe link that takes effect immediately and deletes your email address and alert preferences from our systems entirely — we don't keep a record after you unsubscribe.
• No sharing. We never sell, rent, or share your email address or preferences with employers, recruiters, advertisers, or anyone else.

3. Where your data is stored and sent

We use a small number of specialist infrastructure providers to run Pay Lens, each used only for the specific job described below:

• Database hosting — stores subscriber emails and alert preferences for people who sign up under section 2, alongside our (non-personal) salary data and blog content. This provider is based in Australia, so this data does not leave the country.
• Email delivery — sends the emails you request. This provider is based in the United States, so your email address is processed on US servers when we email you. This is a cross-border disclosure under Australian privacy law, made only to deliver the emails you asked for.
• Website hosting — serves the site and, like any web host, processes standard server logs (IP address, user agent) to do so.
• Rate-limiting / security infrastructure — briefly processes visitor IP addresses (for under a minute at a time) to prevent automated abuse of the site.

We don't name these providers individually here, as they're operational infrastructure rather than services we ask you to trust directly — but we're happy to tell you exactly who they are if you ask (section 9).

4. Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to understand aggregate site usage — which pages are visited, roughly where visitors come from, and how features are used. We do not use analytics to identify individuals, and we do not connect analytics data to alert subscribers. Google Analytics collects anonymised usage data including your IP address (truncated by Google before storage), browser type, and device information. This data is processed by Google in accordance with their Privacy Policy.

You can block analytics with standard browser tools or extensions, and the site works fully with them blocked. You can also opt out via the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

5. Cookies

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. The only cookies and browser storage in use are those required by analytics (section 4) and any preference you explicitly set in our tools, which is stored in your browser, not on our servers.

6. Chrome extension

The Pay Lens Chrome extension shows salary estimates on job listings. When you view a listing, the extension extracts the job ID from the page URL and sends it to paylenshq.com to retrieve salary data. We do not store that lookup against you, we do not build a profile of the jobs you view, and the extension does not read or transmit anything else from your browsing — no page content, no browsing history, no personal information. Job IDs are not linked to your identity. The extension requires no account and no email.

Recent searches (the list of roles in the extension sidebar) is stored entirely in your browser's local storage. This data never leaves your device and is not accessible to us. You can clear it at any time by clearing your browser's local storage or uninstalling the extension.

7. What we don't collect

No names, no CVs, no account passwords, no payment details, no precise location, no contacts, no browsing history. If a future feature needs any of these, we will update this policy first and the feature will be opt-in.

8. Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 you can ask us to access, correct, or delete the personal information we hold about you — for almost everyone that is at most an email address and alert preferences. The fastest routes:

• Delete / stop emails: click unsubscribe in any email, or email us and we'll erase your record entirely.
• Access or correct: email us and we'll send you everything we hold about your address, or update your preferences.

We respond to requests within 30 days (usually much faster). If you're unsatisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

9. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: privacy@paylenshq.com

10. Data security and retention

Subscriber data is stored in our database with access restricted to our service functions (row-level security; no public access). We keep subscriber records only while your subscription is active — unsubscribing deletes them entirely. Non-personal salary data is retained indefinitely as it contains nothing about you.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or who we share it with, we will update this page and change the date at the top. For material changes affecting subscribers, we will tell you by email before they take effect.