Confidentiality and your specification

The same path applies whether you upload a file through the quote form or email a protocol to us directly.

The people working on your enquiry, and no one else. Wetware World is a small early-stage company, so the honest answer today is that the number of people with access to a submission is very small and every one of them is directly involved in sourcing it.

We are not going to describe a role-based access control matrix we do not operate. What we can tell you is that submissions live with the request record rather than being forwarded around, that access to the correspondence mailbox is limited to the people who need it, and that as the team grows this clause gets more specific rather than vaguer.

The technical infrastructure that holds the record is disclosed in the privacy policy, clause 4.

Three states, and you control which one you are in for the first two.

The quote form also lets you say whether you want to know who the supplier is. That is the mirror-image question and the answer is yours too. We will name the supplier on the quotation where they have consented to being named; where they have not, we describe capability, geography and accreditation and name them under NDA on request. We will never imply a partnership that does not exist.

Once you place an order, the winning supplier learns your delivery address at minimum, because that is where the box goes. If you need shipment to an intermediary address for confidentiality reasons, tell us at quotation stage — it is workable for ambient goods and usually a bad idea for cold chain, because every extra handoff is another chance for a dry shipper to sit on a loading dock.

Anonymisation is only meaningful if it is specific, so here is what we remove and what necessarily stays.

Removed:

• your name, role, email address and telephone number;
• your institution, department, laboratory name and principal investigator;
• your delivery address;
• project titles, grant numbers and internal codenames;
• identifying metadata in files where we can strip it, including document authorship and organisational headers.

Necessarily retained, because a supplier cannot quote without it:

• the technical specification itself;
• quantities, recurrence, and the timeline;
• quality documentation and acceptance criteria required;
• delivery format and cold-chain requirement;
• a region, because freight, permits and courier windows depend on it;
• a buyer-type descriptor, because it determines academic or commercial pricing.

A specification can itself be identifying. If your requirement is unusual enough that three people in the world could have written it, anonymisation of the header does not conceal you from a supplier already working in that field. We will tell you when we think that is the case rather than let you assume a protection you do not have. Where it matters, the answer is an NDA before circulation, not a redaction.

The quote form has a box for requesting an NDA before we discuss your requirement with anyone. Ticking it means we come back to you to put one in place before circulation, rather than circulating first.

• We will sign yours. Send your institution's template. It is usually faster than negotiating ours.
• Or we will send ours. A short mutual NDA, no exclusivity, no non-compete, no obligation to buy.
• Supplier NDAs. Where a specification needs to go out under an NDA, we put one in place with each supplier before circulating. This adds days to the timeline and we will tell you how many.

Without an NDA, we still treat your specification as confidential under this policy. The difference an NDA makes is that it is a negotiated instrument with defined remedies, and it binds the suppliers as well as us. For genuinely sensitive work, ask for it.

You can ask us to delete earlier. Email hello@wetwareworld.com and we will delete the specification and its attachments, and confirm when it is done. The exceptions are narrow and we will name them if they apply: material we must keep as part of an order record for tax or trade purposes, and export or end-use screening records where a control regime sets the retention period.

What we cannot do is un-send an enquiry a supplier has already received. Deletion applies to our records. If you need something withdrawn from circulation, tell us immediately and we will ask each supplier to delete it — but we are asking, not compelling, unless an NDA is in place that gives us the right to compel.

Stated as prohibitions on us, because that is what makes them useful to you.

• We do not sell specifications. Not to suppliers, not to data brokers, not to market research firms, not as a lead list, not in aggregate, not ever. There is no version of our business model in which your requirement is the product.
• We do not publish them. No case study, no blog post, no conference talk, no investor deck uses your requirement without your explicit written consent for that specific use.
• We do not share them with your competitors as competitive intelligence. If two customers ask for similar things, each is quoted on its own merits and neither is told the other exists.
• We do not use them to compete with you. We are not going to take your requirement, build the thing ourselves, and sell it to your field. If that ever changes — if a category we broker becomes a category we manufacture — the change is announced on the listing with the Made by Wetware World label before any customer is affected by it.
• We do not train models on them. Submitted specifications and attachments are not fed to third-party machine learning services.
• We do not add you to a marketing list because you asked for a quote. Marketing consent is a separate, unticked box, and answering your enquiry is not marketing.

We do derive statistics from the flow of requests, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, so here is precisely what and precisely how.

What we derive:

• counts by component category — how many requests concern cells, tissue, devices, services;
• how often a requirement turns out to be unsourceable, and in which categories;
• observed price and lead-time ranges by category, used to build the published pricing and lead-time reference;
• which specification fields customers routinely leave blank, so we can improve the form and the WWD standard;
• which quality documents are most often required, to shape supplier requirements.

The rules we hold ourselves to:

• aggregates are published only where they cover enough distinct requests that no single one can be inferred — in practice we do not publish a figure derived from fewer than five independent requests;
• no customer, institution, project or unique requirement is identifiable in anything published;
• a specification unusual enough to be identifying by its content alone is excluded from published aggregates entirely, not merely stripped of a name;
• where we want to publish something specific — a sourcing walk-through, a real quote request as a methodology example — we ask you first, we show you the draft, and we do not publish without written consent.

The point of this work is a published pricing and lead-time reference for a market that has none. That reference benefits buyers, including you. It is not worth building if it leaks the requirements it was built from.

You own what you send. Your specification, protocol, drawings, sequences and data remain yours. Sending them to us grants us a limited licence to do one thing: source and quote against them, including circulating the technical content to candidate suppliers as described in clause 1. Nothing more.

We do not claim rights in your requirement, in derivatives of it, or in a design that emerges from a conversation about it. Where a project involves genuinely novel design work done jointly, ownership is agreed in writing before the work starts rather than argued about afterwards.

Unsolicited ideas. Please do not send us business proposals, product ideas, or inventions unconnected to a quote request. We have no route to review them, we cannot treat them as confidential, and we may already be working on something similar. If you send us an unsolicited idea outside a request for supply, we are free to use it without obligation to you. This is a standard protection against a specific kind of dispute, and it does not touch specifications sent for sourcing, which are covered by everything above.

A confidentiality page that promises perfection is not credible. Four honest limits.

1. Suppliers are separate companies. Once an enquiry reaches a supplier, their handling of it is governed by their terms or by an NDA we put in place, not by this page. We select suppliers partly on how seriously they take this, and we can tell you what terms a given supplier operates under.
2. Anonymisation is not perfect against a knowledgeable reader. See clause 4.
3. We may be legally compelled to disclose. A valid court order, a regulatory demand, or an export control obligation can require disclosure. Where we are permitted to tell you, we will.
4. Our security posture is early-stage. We hold no ISO 27001 certification and no SOC 2 report. What we do have is stated plainly in the privacy policy, clause 10, including the parts where the answer is no.

If any of that is a blocker for your institution, say so before you send anything. An NDA first, a redacted first pass, or a phone conversation before any document changes hands are all normal, and we would rather do it your way than have you not ask at all.

Questions: hello@wetwareworld.com.