It&#x27;s perfectly reasonable for you to decline to provide that information.  It&#x27;s also perfectly for them to decline to provide employment (or consulting business) on the basis of it.<p>I also don&#x27;t like to provide these numbers; my usual (in my view, perfectly ethnical and justified) dodge goes as follows:<p>(1) I give them 1 or 2 numbers that are easily verifiable -- and which I don&#x27;t mind being &quot;leaked&quot; -- e.g. FT salaries at bigcorps in the past few years.  This is in accordance with basic game theory &#x2F; negotiating strategy (whereby if you make a partial concession to people, they feel they have an &quot;out&quot; and and can save face, rather than press you for a full concession to what they were asking for).<p>(2) As to the rest, I say &quot;my clients &#x2F; employers have asked that this information be kept confidential, and I&#x27;d like to honor their requests.&quot;<p>Your suggestion to raise the issue of unintentional leaks (due to concerns about cloud security) is quite excellent, and I may incorporate it into my dodge strategy, also.<p>The bottom line is that most of the people asking are basically drones who don&#x27;t really know why they&#x27;re asking, just that someone told them to (or they have some vague sense that it will provide them with some kind of negotiating leverage).<p>At the end of day, you don&#x27;t have to play their games -- but keep in mind that you&#x27;ll incur a 30% or so automatic rejection chance for doing so, across the board.  My gut feeling is that companies that are sticklers aren&#x27;t really all that desirable to work for, anyway.