Privacy Policy

Welcome to Branchmark ("Branchmark," "we," "us," or "our"). Branchmark operates a skills-based talent verification platform where software engineering candidates demonstrate proficiency through practical, timed tasks within simulated company repositories, and employers evaluate candidates based on authentic, verified performance rather than self-reported resumes.

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, process, disclose, and safeguard personal information when you access or use our website, developer workspaces, APIs, and associated services (collectively, the "Service").

Our Service accommodates two primary user categories with distinct privacy protections:

• Candidates: Developers and job applicants who register an account, complete simulated workplace tasks to establish a baseline proficiency record, and choose to attach their verified record when applying to job opportunities.
• Employers / Team Members: Companies, hiring managers, and recruiters who post job positions, configure required skill criteria, review anonymous applicant evaluations, and collaborate on hiring decisions.

We designed Branchmark with privacy and candidate dignity as core architectural requirements:

• No Video Streaming or Recording: We do not record, stream, or store video feeds or photographic images of candidates. All webcam checks happen ephemerally inside your local browser to generate mathematical presence flags. No pixels ever leave your device.
• Blind Review Guarantee: When you apply to an employer, you are initially represented solely by a pseudonymous identifier (such as C-3F9A1B) alongside your verified task scores and telemetry. Your real name and email address are shielded from the employer until they affirmatively shortlist you.
• Isolated Sandbox Execution: Candidate code executes inside isolated, short-lived microVMs with strict outbound network blocking.
• Affirmative Consent for Record Sharing: Your engineering record is private to you. It is never placed in a public directory or sold to third-party databases. It is shared with an employer only when you affirmatively click "Apply" for that employer's specific position.

We collect information in the following categories:

A. Account & Contact Information

• Candidates: Full name, verified email address, authentication credentials (managed securely through Firebase Authentication and Google OAuth), profile timestamps, and optional career preferences.
• Employers & Reviewers: Full name, corporate email address, employer or company organization name, company domain, and team role (owner, admin, recruiter, or viewer). Employer plans are arranged directly with us and invoiced; we do not currently collect payment card details through the Service.

B. Assessment Submissions & Engineering Performance

• Source code submitted in code editor tasks, test files written, and automated test pass/fail results.
• Written multiple-choice answers for onboarding triage quizzes and architectural PR review decisions.
• Task timing metrics, including overall duration, seconds elapsed until first code edit or action, and active working intervals.
• Questions, prompts, and debugging conversations between you and the built-in workspace assistant during tasks.

C. Integrity & Anti-Cheat Telemetry (How We Protect Test Authenticity)

To provide employers with verified confidence without intrusive surveillance software, Branchmark collects minimal, targeted integrity events:

• Submitted-Code Check: When you submit a code task, we scan your code for signs that it reaches outside the task, such as reading files or the environment, or running something when the program exits. A match is shown to the hiring team next to your record as an integrity signal. It never changes your score.
• In-Browser Camera Presence Verification: Before beginning an assessment task, the platform requests browser camera permission. Every two seconds, the browser samples an ultra-low-resolution 32x24 pixel frame in local memory to compute two numbers: average luminance (brightness) and per-pixel delta (motion). The frame is immediately discarded. If the picture goes dark (indicating a covered camera), or shows no movement for a sustained period, a simple event such as "camera covered" or "no movement" is recorded, along with when the camera started, stopped, or was denied. Stillness can happen while you are reading or thinking, so it is advisory only. No video, images, or biometric identifiers are stored.
• Internal Workspace Clipboard: To maintain assessment integrity, external paste into the code editor is disabled. Copying within the task workspace works normally. If you attempt to paste content copied from an external application, the workspace blocks the action and logs only the occurrence and character count. Clipboard text from outside applications is never inspected, read, or transmitted to our servers.
• Window Focus & Activity: We record when you leave and return to the task tab or window, and counts of keystrokes, clicks, and mouse movement (never which keys you pressed). We record how many characters you copy, and from where (the task instructions, the editor, or elsewhere). Searches within the workspace are counted; search terms are never captured.
• Work History & Replay: Your edits are stored as a timeline of text changes, with periodic snapshots of your solution, your test runs, and your questions to the built-in assistant. Once you apply, the employer's team can play this timeline back and attach notes to moments in it.

Note: Integrity signals are displayed separately to employers as advisory context and never mathematically modify or reduce your underlying skill or task performance scores.

D. Public Portfolio (Optional)

A candidate may create a public portfolio at a link like /u/your-name. It is off until they publish it, and it shows the name they choose, so it is the one place they are not anonymous. It can include text they write (an introduction, projects, links, experience, education, skills and spoken languages), a profile picture, project screenshots and a résumé they upload, their Branchmark score and tasks, their public GitHub activity (read from the GitHub account they connect), and credentials they marked as shown. Anyone with the link can open the public parts without signing in, and the page is hidden from search engines unless the candidate allows listing.

Email and phone, the résumé, teammates and references are never shown on the page itself. A visitor can ask for them with a name and email address, and the candidate approves or declines each request. An approved visitor receives a private link that works for 30 days and can be taken back. Teammates appear only when both people confirm. A reference is written by the person asked, through a one-time link and without an account, and the candidate can show or hide it but cannot change it. Uploaded pictures are re-encoded to remove hidden data such as location. Uploaded files, requests and references are deleted when the candidate removes the portfolio or deletes their account.

E. Device, Log & Analytics Information

When you navigate our website, our servers and analytics providers automatically collect standard web log data, including IP address, browser type, operating system, referring URL, and session analytics via PostHog. You can turn off product analytics at any time in your account settings. This does not change what employers see, and server-side error reports that help us fix outages continue.

We use the information we collect for the following legitimate purposes:

• Scoring & Profile Computation: Synthesizing valid attempt data into standardized proficiency metrics (Skill Match, Overall Score, Consistency, Improvement, and Onboarding Speed).
• Facilitating Blind Review: Delivering candidate profiles to employers under anonymous IDs so decisions are grounded in objective capability.
• Platform Integrity: Enforcing fair-use limits (such as our rolling 24-hour task quota to prevent grinding) and preventing abuse or automated scraping.
• Service Communications: Delivering account security codes, position invitation notices, application status updates, and team collaboration alerts.
• System Maintenance: Diagnosing sandbox execution failures, fixing compiler errors, and monitoring platform uptime and performance.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We share information only in the limited circumstances described below:

• With Employers When You Apply: When you apply to a position, the employer team receives access to your candidate evaluation: your anonymous ID, aggregate proficiency scores, submitted code and test outcomes, task replay timelines, and workspace assistant conversations. Your real identity (name and email) is revealed only if the employer chooses to shortlist you.
• Service Providers & Subprocessors: We work with trusted infrastructure providers that handle data strictly on our behalf:
  • Google Cloud Platform & Firebase: Authentication and database storage (Firestore).
  • Vercel: Application hosting and serverless compute, including scheduled maintenance jobs.
  • E2B (E2B.dev): Isolated, ephemeral microVM execution sandboxes for running Vitest and Pytest candidate code test suites. Sandboxes are destroyed upon task completion.
  • Anthropic & Google Cloud AI: Language model inference for the monitored workspace assistant and automated assessment package generation.
  • Resend: Transactional email delivery for security codes, team invitations, position invitations, and emails about your applications (a company shortlisting you or ending an application), which you can switch off from your account page or the link in each email.
  • PostHog: Product analytics and application performance monitoring.
• Legal Requirements & Safety: We may disclose information if required by subpoena, court order, or applicable law, or where disclosure is necessary to protect the security, integrity, or legal rights of Branchmark, our users, or the public.

We retain personal data only as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this policy or as required by law:

• Candidate Profiles & Records: Your submitted tasks, scores, work history and replay timeline, integrity events, assistant conversations, and applications are kept for as long as your account remains active, so you can reuse your baseline record when applying to multiple opportunities. When you sign up from one of our landing pages, we also keep the name of that page (for example, the candidates page) on your profile so we can count sign-ups by page. They are deleted or anonymized when you delete your account (see Section 7).
• Employer Reviews: Notes, scorecards, and stage decisions that employer teams record on an application are kept with that application until the application or the candidate's account is deleted.
• Employer-Sent Assessments & Live Interviews: Candidate work from assessment invitations and live interviews is deleted automatically after a retention period the employer sets (between 7 and 365 days, 30 days by default), and expired links are removed.
• Rate Limiting Counters: Short-lived counters used to prevent abuse are removed automatically.
• Demo Requests: The name, work email, company, role and message you send through the request-demo form, and the name of the page you came from (for example the pricing page), are used to reply to you and are deleted automatically after twelve months.

You have full control over your account. You can request deletion of your account at any time via your account settings page (/portal/settings for candidates, or /settings for employers).

The Deletion & Anonymization Process:

1. 7-Day Cancellation Grace Period: To safeguard against accidental or unauthorized deletion, requesting deletion schedules your account for permanent removal 7 days out. All active login tokens are revoked immediately. If you sign in again during that week, you can choose to restore your account.
2. Complete Personal Data Purge: Once the 7-day grace period concludes, our automated retention system permanently deletes your authentication sign-in, personal profile, verified email, name, team memberships, and active job applications.
3. Wipe of Working State & Assistant Logs: Every piece of working code, keystroke telemetry, and assistant conversation history is permanently erased.
4. Statistical Anonymization: To preserve the statistical validity of employer historical reporting and prevent skewing skill calibrations, summaries of tasks you submitted (task, score, time used, and aggregate activity and integrity counts such as time active or pastes blocked; camera measurements are removed) are kept under a randomly generated pseudonymous identifier (such as deleted-9f8a1c3d5e7b...) that cannot be linked back to you. Your code, edit timeline, and assistant conversations are not kept. Feedback you sent us is deleted, and start and submit times are rounded down to the midnight UTC day boundary.

Employer accounts: when an employer deletes their account, positions, assessments, invitations, and interviews that belong to them alone are deleted. Positions that belong to a team stay with the team, and an owner of a team with other members must transfer ownership first. Because deleting a candidate's account removes their application, any notes and scorecards an employer team recorded on it are removed too.

Depending on your jurisdiction (including the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and California), you possess specific statutory rights regarding your personal information:

• Right to Know / Access: You can download a copy of the personal information we hold about you from your account page, or ask us for it.
• Right to Rectification: You can update inaccurate account data through your account settings or by contacting us.
• Right to Erasure ("Right to be Forgotten"): You can permanently delete your account and personal records as described in Section 7.
• Right to Data Portability: You can request your submitted records in a structured, standard format.
• Right to Object / Restrict Processing: You can opt out of non-essential analytics tracking.
• Non-Discrimination: We will never discriminate against you, deny services, or charge different prices for exercising your statutory privacy rights.

To exercise any of these rights, contact our privacy team at privacy@branchmark.com. We respond to verified requests within thirty (30) days.

We implement comprehensive technical and organizational safeguards to protect your personal information:

• Data in transit is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS), and data stored in our database is encrypted at rest.
• Database security rules deny access by default. Candidates can read only their own records, employer teams can read only their own positions and applications, and all writes go through our servers.
• Candidate code runs in isolated sandboxes with no internet access, separate from our application servers.

Branchmark is designed exclusively for adult software professionals and job applicants. The Service is not directed to individuals under sixteen (16) years of age, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we learn that a user under 16 has registered an account, we will delete their information.

Branchmark operates primarily in the United States. If you access the Service from the European Union, the United Kingdom, or other regions with laws governing data collection and use, please note that your personal information will be transferred to, processed, and stored in the United States. Where the law requires a transfer mechanism, we will rely on one that regulators recognise.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect modifications to our platform, new features, or changing legal standards. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the updated policy on this page with a revised effective date and, where appropriate, notifying you via email or platform notification. Your continued use of the Service following the posting of an updated policy constitutes your acknowledgment of the changes.

If you have questions, feedback, or concerns regarding this Privacy Policy, our data practices, or your statutory rights, please contact our Privacy Team at: