Data practices

This page is the plain-language version of how OperatorIndex handles the numbers you enter in the calculator. The privacy policy is the formal version; both are kept in lockstep.

What we collect

• Your email — to send you the benchmark PDF and let you find your report later. We do not resell email lists, ever.
• The 12 calculator inputs — vertical, ARR band, gross margin, NRR, CAC payback, magic number, services mix, etc.
• A first-party anonymous id — a random UUID set in a cookie called northtide_anon. It cannot identify you across browsers, devices, or people. We use it only so a delete request can find your row without you needing to remember which email you used.
• A hashed IP + user-agent — for abuse detection only. The hashes rotate daily and are never reversible to the original values.

Consent — opt-in, versioned, revocable

On the calculator’s final step there is a checkbox:

“Include my anonymized inputs in aggregated benchmark research. No company-identifying data is ever shared.”

• Unchecked by default. If you don’t tick it, your submission is used to produce your benchmark PDF and nothing else.
• Versioned. Every consent we record is stamped with the version of the disclosure text you saw, so we can prove which prompt was on screen at the time.
• Revocable. Use the data-request page to delete your submission. We re-run the aggregation pipeline after every delete so your row stops contributing to any subsequent snapshot.

Aggregation — the n ≥ 25 rule

The only benchmark data that ever leaves our servers is an aggregated snapshot: per-vertical, per-ARR-band counts and percentiles (p25/p50/p75). The aggregation pipeline enforces a hard floor:

No segment is ever published with fewer than 25 consented submissions.

When a fine-grained segment falls below 25, the pipeline rolls up to a broader cohort (vertical+ARR band → vertical only → all-verticals) until it finds a cohort that meets the floor. If even the all-vertical cohort has fewer than 25 consented rows, nothing is published for that metric. This is called k-anonymity and is the backbone of the protection we offer everyone who consents.

What we do NOT do

• We never sell individual submission rows. Not to data buyers, not to AWS Data Exchange, not to anyone. There is no API surface that returns individual rows; the only benchmark endpoint emits aggregated snapshots and is checked by a unit test plus a database trigger to enforce n ≥ 25.
• We never resell your email. Period.
• We don’t enrich your data with third-party sources. The numbers in your benchmark are exactly the ones you typed.

Information Officer

Northtide Data Holdings, LLC has registered an Information Officer for the purposes of Botswana’s Data Protection Act, South Africa’s POPIA, and the equivalent obligations under the GDPR and CCPA. To request access, correction, or deletion, email privacy@operator-index.com or use the data-request page.

Versioning of this page

The current consent prompt version is v1-2026-06-16. Any material change to the calculator’s data collection, the n ≥ 25 floor, or what we do with consented rows will increment that version and update this page on the same day.