You own it. We just hold it carefully.

Your records are yours. WoolPass is their custodian, not their owner — we hold them so they can prove something for you, and you decide who ever sees them.

One thing to be clear about up front, because it is unusual: the chain itself is a permanent record. What you control is how much of it is public and whether your name is on it — not whether the proof survives. Why, further down.

Nothing is public unless you make it public

Every bale, every document, every photograph starts private. That is the default in the software, not a setting you have to go and find. A record only becomes visible to anyone else when you choose to make it so, and each choice is separate:

• Your public profile — your name and region on a passport somebody scans.
• Sharing with buyers — your details going to someone who wants to buy your wool.
• Sharing with carriers — and to the people who move it.

You can turn any of them off later. Silence is never taken as a yes: anything you have not agreed to is treated as declined.

Who can see what

Two questions have to be answered before anyone sees anything, and one never stands in for the other: did you agree to share it, and is the person asking entitled to see it. Both must pass. Here is what that means in practice.

That fifth row matters more than it looks. Wool from several farms goes into one lot all the time, and a passport that listed everyone in it would quietly turn every shared link into a supplier list. It does not.

Verify privately, publish the outcome

Some numbers have to be checked but should never be published. A mill’s blend ratios are its commercial position. A farm’s weights are its business. Asking either of them to publish those is asking them not to take part.

And when we do publish a proportion, we say exactly what it is. A percentage on a WoolPass passport is a mass-balance allocation — an accounting share of the wool that went in — not a claim about which physical fibres ended up in one particular garment. That distinction is stated every time, because the honest version is the only one worth building.

Your record gets stronger when someone else agrees with you

This is the part most people do not expect. The most valuable thing in WoolPass is not what you say about your own wool — it is what two independent businesses say about the same batch.

When a scourer records that 760 kilograms left, and the mill down the chain records what arrived, those two numbers are checked against each other. If they agree, both records get stronger, and the earlier one is upgraded from declared to confirmed. Nobody had to fill in an extra form: each simply recorded their own side of the same handover.

Recording your own receipt improves somebody else’s record.
That is the whole idea, in one sentence.

The same logic applies to what a chain does not have. If a processor will not share its in and out weights, we do not hide it and we do not block the product — the chain shows a gap at that step, labelled, and everything after it carries less confidence. Honest, and visible.

What we never do

• We do not sell your information. Not to anyone, at any price.
• We do not use it to train somebody else’s AI.
• We do not publish your name, your farm or your business without your say-so.
• We do not run advertising, tracking pixels or cross-site profiling — which is also why there is no cookie banner to click away.

How AI is used, and where it stops

AI reads your photographs and documents and suggests what they say — a weight off a bale label, an expiry off a certificate, a first draft of your story in your own words. Every suggestion is shown as a suggestion. You review it, edit it and approve it before it is recorded as fact or shown to anyone.

Separately, and deliberately kept apart, a scoring engine tests claims against evidence: does the arithmetic hold, do two parties agree, is the certificate current. A score is a measure of how much evidence supports a claim, it is shown with the reasons behind it, and you can challenge it. No decision that matters to you is made by a machine on its own.

The record is permanent. Your presence in it is not.

This is the one place WoolPass differs from most systems, and it is worth being plain about.

The chain is a ledger, not a file about you. A bale, its weights, the lot it went into, what was scoured and combed and by whom — those stay. A ledger that can be quietly edited afterwards proves nothing, and if evidence could disappear the moment it became inconvenient, no buyer would be right to rely on any of it.

You can still step out of it. The accountable party here is an organisation, not the person holding the phone. Ask, and your name comes off records that stay — the chain goes on saying “this scourer recorded 759.9 kg on this date”, without saying it was you.

• See it — ask for a copy of everything we hold about you.
• Correct it — most of it you can edit yourself, in the app.
• Withdraw a consent — any time, in Settings. It stops future sharing; it cannot unsend what has already gone.
• Take your name off — personal identifiers come out of records that remain, and your account and profile are deleted when you close it.

Where it lives

In Amazon Web Services’ Sydney region, encrypted in transit and at rest. Access inside WoolPass is limited to the people who need it, and administrative access is logged. Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes — nobody here can read yours. Uploaded evidence is fingerprinted when it arrives, so a file cannot be quietly swapped for a different one later.

The full detail Privacy & data policy Exactly what we collect, the legal basis for it, how long we keep it, and how to make a request or a complaint.

Anything here you would like answered properly before you sign up, ask us: contact@woolpass.com. A person replies.

WoolPass is operated by WoolTrace NZ Limited, NZBN 9429053106858, registered in New Zealand. We ask supply chains to say who they are, so we say it first.