Privacy notice

Merito (merito.farbeenterprise.com) is run by Farbe Enterprise, Plot No 2900 28 29 30 31, Ankleshwar, Gujarat 393002, India (“we”, “us”). We decide how and why Merito uses personal data, which makes us the data fiduciary under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (the DPDP Act). The contact above is our grievance officer under that Act.

Only what you type, upload or do on Merito. Many fields are optional.

• Every account: your name or your organisation's name, your e-mail address and a password. The password is stored only as a one-way hash, so nobody at Merito can read it. Each sign-in is recorded with the date, your IP address and your browser.
• Candidates: your phone number if you give it; your profile (headline, location, photo, summary, skills, languages, education, work history with dates and reasons for leaving, projects, certifications, CV, expected salary, notice period and preferred locations); your gender and date of birth, only if you choose to add them (employers can see them: see who can see what); links to your profiles on other sites; the talent pool you choose; the ID document you share to verify your identity; documents you upload as proof of a job, degree or certificate; assessment answers and results; achievements, work samples and the referees you name; reviews you write about employers; and the jobs you save and apply for.
• Students: your campus profile: college, degree, graduation year, internships, projects, activities and what you are looking for, and an academic score that stays private unless you choose to show it.
• Colleague feedback: when you ask someone for feedback, you give us their name and e-mail address; they leave a rating and a comment through a private link.
• Employers and their HR team: company name, industry, website, logo, description and size; statutory details such as GSTIN, PAN or EPFO code if you add them; your team members' names, designations and e-mail addresses; your jobs, searches, saved searches and candidate lists; and the credits you use.
• Colleges: institution name, affiliation, website, placement officer's name, programmes and batches.
• Consultants: agency name, specialisations and website, your client companies, and the placements credited to you, with salary and commission.
• Freelancers: name, skills, hourly rate and portfolio link, and how your referral links perform.
• Activity: the notifications Merito shows you, and some of what you do: for example, employers' searches and the candidate profiles they open are logged, which is how candidates see how often people like them are looked for.

Some people are on Merito because someone else added them, before they ever signed up. If that is you, this is what may have been added:

• A company you worked for can put you on its staff list: name, e-mail address, phone, Aadhaar number, UAN (your EPFO Universal Account Number), department, designation, employee code, dates of joining and leaving, notice period, reason for leaving and notes. If a row in a company's spreadsheet matches someone already on Merito by e-mail address, phone number, Aadhaar number or UAN, that person is added to the company's staff list too, and a phone number, UAN or Aadhaar number missing from their record is filled in from the row.
• A company can report on a person it says worked for it: ratings in ten areas such as communication, technical skill and punctuality, how the person left (for example “resigned, served full notice” or “left without notice”), whether it would rehire them, and comments. A report written by an HR team member is published only when a director of that company approves it.
• A recruiter can copy a person's details from a page on another job site, such as LinkedIn or Naukri, with Merito's browser extension: name, e-mail address, phone, headline, location, summary, skills, languages, education, work history, years of experience, expected salary, availability, links and the address of the page it came from. Photos, CV links and gender are not copied.
• A college can upload its students: name, e-mail address, phone, degree, branch, and years of admission and passing out.
• A placement: when a hire is credited to a consultant or to a freelancer's referral, Merito keeps a record of who was placed, with which employer, when, and at what annual salary. The consultant and the person's college see all of it; the freelancer sees the names.
• An employer you applied to can record interviews and offers (Campus Talent only), and after hiring someone can record whether they stayed 6 and 12 months, whether their work was satisfactory and whether the information they gave was accurate.
• An employer checking a document a candidate gave them (an offer letter, payslip, experience letter or bank statement) can upload the PDF for an automatic check of how the file was made.

When a company adds one person with an e-mail address, Merito e-mails that address an invitation to claim the profile straight away; people added in a spreadsheet are invited when the company sends invitations from its staff list. The invitation names the company, says what the profile shows and explains how to have it removed. Merito does not e-mail students a college uploads. Companies and colleges agree in our terms to tell the people they add.

Until the person claims it, the profile has no public page, is not shown in talent-pool searches, and no employer can unlock its contact details. The company or college that added the person can see it, and so can another company whose staff-list spreadsheet matches the same person. Directors of other companies can open published reports about the person only if they already know the person's e-mail address, phone number, Aadhaar number or UAN (see who can see what).

Don't want to be on Merito? Write to info@FarbeEnterprise.com with your name and who added you. We will remove the profile and everything attached to it, except anything the law requires us to keep, and tell you what that is.

• Merito does not ask for your Aadhaar number when you sign up. An employer can add it when it puts you on its staff list.
• An Aadhaar number added to a record is stored encrypted, together with a keyed fingerprint: a one-way code made with a secret key, which lets Merito notice that two records are the same person without unlocking the number. Merito never shows a number stored this way: not on your profile, not to employers (they see only that a number is on file) and not on our team's screens.
• An employer that already knows your Aadhaar number can use it to find you: to match you on its staff list or, for a director, to look up published reports about you.
• To verify your identity, you give our team a link to your Aadhaar card, e-Aadhaar or another ID document. A member of the Merito team opens it, so they see everything on it, including the number; we suggest a masked Aadhaar, which shows only the last four digits. They compare it with your profile and approve or reject the request. We keep the link, the decision and any note. The form's optional reference box is kept as you type it and shown to you and our reviewers, so do not type your full Aadhaar number there. Employers see whether your identity is verified, never the document.
• Documents you upload as proof of a job, degree or certificate (PDF, JPG or PNG) are kept in private storage and seen only by you and Merito's reviewers. Merito also checks automatically how each PDF was made, to spot altered documents.

• To run your account: signing in, password resets, and e-mails about your account (confirming your address, claim invitations, and an alert when your phone number changes).
• To verify what you tell us: your identity, your jobs (by document, by your past employer's confirmation or from its staff list), and your degrees and certificates.
• To decide whether you are admitted to a talent pool, and to work out your reputation scores and badges.
• To show employers, consultants and colleges the people they are allowed to see, to let employers and consultants search and filter them (by gender and age too, if you added them), and to match candidates with jobs.
• To let employers, colleges and consultants run their hiring: jobs, applications, staff lists and placements.
• To keep Merito safe: to stop spam, password guessing and fake accounts, and to spot altered documents.
• To understand how Merito is used, from counts such as searches and applications per talent pool.

We do not sell your details, and we do not use them for advertising.

Merito's server makes two kinds of automatic decision from the evidence on your profile:

• whether you are admitted to Merito Verified Professionals or Merito Campus Talent, under the rules published on How it works;
• your reputation scores, your status (Profile, Verified, Trusted, Elite or Platinum) and your badges.

Both are worked out again when your evidence changes, and your Talent pool and Reputation pages show each rule and what each score rests on. Your gender, date of birth, age and photo are never used in these decisions or scores. A paid plan never admits anyone or changes a score. People, not software, decide identity checks, document reviews and reported forgeries.

If you think a decision is wrong, write to info@FarbeEnterprise.com and a member of our team will look at it. For an interview or offer record on Campus Talent, use “Ask for a review” on your Talent pool page.

• The public sees nothing unless you publish a public profile. You choose which parts it shows. It never shows your e-mail address, phone number, Aadhaar number or documents, and a candidate's page is shown only while they are admitted to a talent pool. Search engines may list published pages.
• Employers and consultants can open the profile of a candidate who is admitted to either talent pool, who applied to one of their jobs, or who is on their own staff list. They see the work history, education, skills, CV, expected salary, reputation scores and verification status. If you added your gender or date of birth, they see them too and can narrow their searches by gender and age. A confirmed document dispute (a document our team found had been altered) is shown to employers, with the name of the company that reported it.
• Your e-mail address and phone number: a company that has you on its staff list, whether it added you or a row in its spreadsheet matched you, sees the e-mail address, phone number and UAN on that record. Merito does not e-mail you when a spreadsheet adds you. Other employers and consultants see your e-mail address and phone number only when they unlock your contact details, which costs them a credit, and never for a profile that has not been claimed.
• Reports from employers: a director of another company who enters your exact e-mail address, phone number, Aadhaar number or UAN can open the reports companies have published about you, for a credit. The reports do not name the company or the person who wrote them. Your Feedback page shows the average rating from these reports; to see the reports themselves, ask us (see your rights).
• Past employers: if you ask a past employer on Merito to confirm a job, it sees your name, the role, the dates and any note you add. An employer checking your documents can ask the same; the past employer then sees who the person is, the role and the dates, but not your documents or who is asking.
• Colleges see the students and graduates on their own lists. For students: name, e-mail address, course, batch, year of study, placement status and Merito score. For graduates: name, photo, current job title, employer and location, Merito score and the contact details the college itself gave. They also see their students' placement records. They do not see the phone number or date of birth a student adds to their own profile.
• Our team: Farbe Enterprise staff who run Merito can see account details to review verifications, reports and requests for help.
• Service providers: our hosting provider keeps Merito's website, database and files, and an e-mail service sends Merito's e-mails. They handle data only to provide that service to us.
• The law: we share details with the police, a court or a government body only when the law requires it.

Merito does not send your details to any AI service: reading CVs, checking documents, scores and matching all run on Merito's own server, by fixed rules. Sign-in with Google and DigiLocker verification are not switched on; we will update this notice before either is.

Merito has no advertising or tracking cookies and no visitor analytics. When you sign in, your sign-in is kept in your browser's storage on your device: until you close the browser or, if you tick “Keep me signed in”, until you sign out or it expires. A few display choices, such as a collapsed menu, are remembered in your browser too. Merito's pages and fonts come from Merito itself, not from other companies' servers.

We keep your account, profile and sign-in records while your account is open. If you ask us to delete your account, we delete it, except anything the law requires us to keep, and tell you what that is. A profile someone else created stays until the person claims it or asks us to remove it.

• Aadhaar numbers added to records are stored encrypted, and passwords are stored only as one-way hashes.
• CVs and documents are kept in private storage and handed out only after Merito checks who is asking. Profile photos and logos are public, because public pages show them.
• Pages and data travel over an encrypted connection (HTTPS).
• Sign-in attempts are limited to slow down password guessing.
• A change of phone number is logged, and you are e-mailed about it.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your details, we will tell you and the Data Protection Board of India, as the DPDP Act requires.

Under the DPDP Act you can:

• get a summary of the personal data we hold about you, what we do with it and who we have shared it with;
• have it corrected, completed or updated;
• have it erased, and withdraw your consent (this stops future use; it does not undo what was lawfully done before);
• complain to our grievance officer, who replies within 7 days;
• nominate someone to use these rights for you if you die or cannot act yourself;
• complain to the Data Protection Board of India if you are not satisfied with our answer. The Act asks you to write to our grievance officer first; the Board works as a digital office and takes complaints online.

To use any of them, write to info@FarbeEnterprise.com from the e-mail address on your account (if you have no account, tell us how to reach you) and say what you would like. We may ask you to confirm who you are first.

You can do a lot yourself: edit your details under My profile, choose what your Public profile shows or unpublish it, remove your photo and change your password.

Merito is for people aged 18 and over. Do not create an account if you are younger. Colleges may add only students who are 18 or older. If we learn that we hold the details of someone under 18, we delete them.

When Merito changes in a way that affects this notice, we update it and the date at the top. Questions? See the contact page and our terms of use.