Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Clinical Precedent is operated by Elite Tech Media LLC (“we”). For anything privacy-related, contact privacy@clinicalprecedent.com.

2. What we collect

• Account information. When you create an account: your name, email address, and password. Authentication is handled by our provider Clerk; passwords are stored by Clerk in hashed form and never visible to us. Clerk also keeps a record of your sign-ins (time, network address and device) for account security, and your two-factor settings if you use them. If we invite you to the service, we give Clerk your email address to send the invitation; an unaccepted invitation expires after 30 days.
• Messages you send us. When you use the contact form or the invoice form: your email, the organization if you give it, what the message is about (or, on the invoice form, your role and the plan you asked about), the message itself, and, if you are signed in, a reference to your account. We use it only to answer you, and we delete it from our database once it is handled; the copy in our support mailbox is kept with our correspondence.
• Content you save in the service. Your watchlist (names you choose to monitor), your bookmarks (links to pages within the service), and the dates you added or reviewed them. We store only what the features need.
• Payment information. Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our systems; we hold only your subscription status and a Stripe customer reference. Stripe collects your billing address and, if you give one, a tax ID.
• Technical basics. Like nearly every website, our hosting provider (Vercel) produces server logs (network address, request time and the address of the page requested) used for security and operations. For some pages that address includes what was looked up (a name, a search term or a document’s number, for example). The logs are kept on the provider’s schedule (section 5); we do not use them to see what anyone looked up, and nothing of ours stores it. We run no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics, and we set no advertising or analytics cookies. The cookies we use sign you in and protect forms from forgery; in the browsers our own staff sign in from, one marker keeps our visits out of the traffic counts. Your browser’s own storage holds a few settings (whether video captions are on, for example) and an open assistant conversation, which is sent only as section 3 describes. If a change to your watchlist or saved items cannot be saved to your account, the list is also kept in your browser, so that the save can be tried again or, for a watchlist, so that you can choose to import it.
• Account activity. For each account we keep a day-by-day count of how the service was used: the days you signed in, which pages and tools you used (the vetting report, comparison, search, the watchlist and so on) and how many times, and how much you read — how many records were opened, names checked, searches run, documents downloaded and questions asked of the assistant — together with a one-way hashed form of the network address used, so we can tell how many places an account is being used from. These are counts of activity, never its content: we do not keep a record of which clinical investigators, sites or documents you looked at, or what you searched for.
• Site traffic. For the site as a whole, we count how many times each page is viewed and each feature is used per day, what kind of site visitors arrived from (a search engine, LinkedIn and so on), which page they arrived on, which country they came from and whether they used a phone or a computer. We also count how many different visitors use the site. So that no one is counted twice, a signed-out visitor is given a one-way code, made from the network address and browser, that is replaced every month and discarded shortly after that month is over; the code is never linked to an account. These counts are site-wide totals: we keep no network address, and the totals that remain cannot be traced back to a person, an account or a device. They set no cookies of their own, and they do not record what anyone searched for or looked at. We use them to see which pages and features are useful and how many people use the service.
• Correspondence. If you email us, we keep the correspondence.

3. How we use it

To provide and secure the service: signing you in, storing and syncing your watchlist and bookmarks, processing subscriptions, answering support requests, and (only if you turn it on, and only for names you have chosen to watch) sending you a weekly email digest of new FDA activity — which you can turn off at any time; every digest has a one-click unsubscribe. Before a digest is sent, our staff check its matches for accuracy; otherwise our staff look at your saved content only when you ask us for help with it. We also send transactional email (account and billing notices), and we may email you about your account, about getting started, and about changes to the service or new features; every such email carries an unsubscribe link, and only transactional account, billing and security notices are sent regardless. We do not use your saved content for anything beyond serving you — we do not mine watchlists for analytics, we do not build aggregate products from user data, we do not show you third-party advertising, and we do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.

How we use account activity. The activity counts described above are used to enforce the usage limits in our Terms of Service and spot automated extraction; to support you (for example, to notice that a new account has not got started, or to help when you write to us); to see which parts of the service are used, so we can improve it; and to manage subscriptions and renewals. We may email you about your own account on that basis. Because they hold no content, they cannot show anyone — us included — which clinical investigators, sites or documents you looked at, or what you searched for.

The AI assistant, only if you use it. Four kinds of page offer an AI assistant: a record page (“Ask about this record”), a warning letter, another FDA document we hold (a disqualification or debarment document, for example), and a comparison of records. If you ask it a question, your question and what you asked about — the record we hold for that clinical investigator, site or organization, that document together with what our record holds about it, or the records being compared — are sent to our AI provider (Anthropic, below) to produce the answer; your name, email and account are not sent.

An “Ask” button in the app’s top bar opens an assistant that answers from our guides and opens the right tool. If you use it, your question and the earlier questions and answers in the same conversation are sent, and nothing else: no record, document, watchlist or account detail. We do not keep the conversation; it stays in your browser, and Anthropic handles it as section 4 describes. Nothing is sent to an AI provider unless you ask one of these assistants a question, and nothing else you do here — vetting, comparison, search, the watchlist, reports — is sent.

4. Who processes it

We share personal information only with the service providers that run the product, under their own security and privacy obligations. The current list is kept on this page and updated when a provider is added:

• Clerk — account authentication;
• Stripe — payment processing;
• Neon — the database that stores your saved content and the messages you send us;
• Resend — sending our email, including the weekly digests you opt into and the notice our team receives when you send us a message or request an invoice;
• Vercel — hosting and logs;
• Fastmail — our support and privacy mailboxes, where messages you send us and our replies are kept;
• Cloudflare — delivers our product video file. It receives your network address when the video loads, and nothing about your account;
• Anthropic — the AI provider behind the AI assistants (“Ask about this record”, its counterparts on document and comparison pages, and the “Ask” assistant in the app’s top bar), used only when you ask one a question. It receives the question and the record, document or conversation you asked with, not your name, email or account. Under its terms Anthropic does not use them to train its models and normally deletes them within 30 days.

Beyond that, we disclose information only if required by law or legal process, to protect the service and its users, or as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets (in which case this policy continues to apply to the transferred data).

5. Retention and deletion

Your account data and saved content are kept for as long as your account exists. When your account is deleted — at your request, at privacy@clinicalprecedent.com — we delete your saved content and your account activity counts from our database and your account from our authentication provider. Site-wide totals, which identify no one, are kept. Residual copies may persist briefly in routine encrypted backups before aging out. Ordinary server logs rotate on our hosting provider’s standard schedule. Billing records stay with Stripe and in our accounts for as long as tax and accounting law require. Messages you sent us are handled as section 2 says.

6. Security

All traffic to the service is encrypted in transit (TLS). Saved content is keyed to your account and accessible only through your signed session. Our staff do not browse saved content; they look at yours only when you ask for help with it or when checking a digest before it is sent. Our staff can see the account activity counts described in section 2, which hold no content. Access to production credentials is restricted. No system is perfectly secure, but the service is deliberately built to hold as little about you as possible — the best protection for data is not collecting it.

7. Your rights and choices

You can update your email, password and two-factor sign-in on your account page, linked from the top of every page once you’re signed in, and view or edit everything you’ve saved directly in the service (your watchlist and saved items are ordinary pages in the service). You may also ask us to export or delete your data, or ask what we hold about you, at privacy@clinicalprecedent.com — we honor such requests regardless of where you live, and applicable law (such as state privacy laws or the GDPR, where it applies) may give you additional rights, including the right to complain to a supervisory authority. We do not discriminate against you for exercising any of them.

8. About the FDA-record data in the service

Separately from data about our users: the service’s content is derived from publicly available U.S. FDA records and includes the names of individuals and organizations that appear in those records (such as clinical investigators named in inspection and enforcement documents). We republish and organize the public record; we do not add non-public personal information to it. If you believe a record about you is being presented inaccurately, contact privacy@clinicalprecedent.com and we will review it. Our Terms of Service prohibit using this data for FCRA-covered purposes such as employment or credit decisions.

9. Children

The service is for professional use and not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.

10. International visitors

The service is operated from the United States and data is stored on U.S. servers. If you use it from elsewhere, you understand your information is processed in the U.S.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will post the new version here and update the effective date; for material changes we will give notice (for example by email or an in-service notice). The current version is always at this page.

12. Contact

Elite Tech Media LLC · privacy@clinicalprecedent.com · general support: support@clinicalprecedent.com