Peer comparison privacy

Benchmarking is only worth doing if it is safe to participate in. Forest is built so that contributing to a peer cohort never exposes your security posture to anyone else, and so that no other organization's posture is exposed to you.

What privacy-preserving means here

When Forest compares you against your industry and size cohort, it shows you a cohort average, not the underlying records that formed it. You see how you sit relative to the group. You do not see any individual organization's scores, capabilities, or maturity values, and they do not see yours.

The comparison is computed deterministically by the Forest Intelligence Service from aggregate inputs. Because the output is an average across the cohort, a single participant's data cannot be reconstructed from what you are shown.

Why it matters

Security maturity data is sensitive. If benchmarking required exposing your weak spots to competitors, the responsible choice would be to opt out, and the benchmark would lose its value as more organizations made that choice. Privacy-preserving comparison removes that trade-off. You get the context of a peer average without taking on disclosure risk.

A peer delta from this comparison is a performance difference against the group average, never a window into a named organization.

How it fits together

This is the safeguard underneath your Industry Score and the cohorts described in benchmark methodology. Your own scores, such as Org Score, are always computed from your data alone and are never affected by what peers can see.