Confidentiality and your specification

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

Access is limited to the people working on your enquiry. Wetware World is a small early-stage company; every person with access to a submission is directly involved in sourcing it.

We do not operate a role-based access control matrix. Submissions live with the request record rather than being forwarded, and access to the correspondence mailbox is limited to the people who need it.

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

Three states. The first two are buyer-controlled.

The quote form also asks whether you want the supplier named. We 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.

On order placement, the winning supplier receives your delivery address. Shipment to an intermediary address can be arranged at quotation stage. It is workable for ambient goods. For cold chain it adds a handling step and increases the risk of a temperature excursion.

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.

Retained, as required for a supplier to quote:

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

A specification can itself be identifying. Where a requirement is unusual, header anonymisation does not conceal the buyer from a supplier working in that field. We state when we assess this to be the case. The available measure is an NDA before circulation.

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.
• Or we will send ours. A short mutual NDA, no exclusivity, no non-compete, no obligation to buy.
• Supplier NDAs. Where a specification goes out under an NDA, we put one in place with each supplier before circulating. This adds days to the timeline; we state how many.

Without an NDA, your specification is treated as confidential under this policy. An NDA is a negotiated instrument with defined remedies and binds the suppliers as well as us.

Deletion on request. Email [email protected] and we will delete the specification and its attachments, and confirm on completion. The exceptions are 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.

Deletion applies to our records. An enquiry already received by a supplier cannot be recalled. On request we will ask each supplier to delete it. We can compel deletion only where an NDA in place gives us that right.

Wetware World does not:

• Sell specifications. Not to suppliers, data brokers or market research firms, not as a lead list, and not in aggregate.
• Publish them. No case study, blog post, conference talk or investor deck uses your requirement without your explicit written consent for that specific use.
• Share them with competitors as competitive intelligence. Where two customers request similar items, each is quoted separately and neither is told the other exists.
• Use them to compete with the buyer. Where 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.
• Train models on them. Submitted specifications and attachments are not sent to third-party machine learning services.
• Add you to a marketing list on the basis of a quote request. Marketing consent is a separate, unticked box.

Derived statistics:

• counts by component category: 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 are routinely left blank, used to revise the form and the WWD standard;
• which quality documents are most often required, to shape supplier requirements.

Rules applied:

• aggregates are published only where no single request can be inferred. No figure derived from fewer than five independent requests is published;
• no customer, institution, project or unique requirement is identifiable in anything published;
• a specification identifying by its content alone is excluded from published aggregates;
• publication of a specific case, such as a sourcing walk-through or a quote request used as a methodology example, requires written consent, and the draft is shown to you first.

The output of this work is a published pricing and lead-time reference.

You own what you send. Your specification, protocol, drawings, sequences and data remain yours. Sending them to us grants a limited licence to source and quote against them, including circulating the technical content to candidate suppliers as described in clause 1, and no other licence.

We claim no rights in your requirement, in derivatives of it, or in a design arising from a conversation about it. Where a project involves joint design work, ownership is agreed in writing before the work starts.

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 and cannot treat them as confidential. An unsolicited idea sent outside a request for supply may be used by us without obligation to you. This clause does not apply to specifications sent for sourcing, which are covered above.

Four limits apply to the commitments above.

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. The terms a given supplier operates under are available on request.
2. Anonymisation does not defeat 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. Measures in place are listed in the privacy policy, clause 10.

Where these limits are a blocker for your institution, raise it before sending anything. An NDA first, a redacted first pass, or a conversation before any document changes hands are all available.

Enquiries: [email protected].