Non Disclosure Agreement - Adobe Sign

[e1350c10]

Hello, it is a required procedure at our company to send NDA before hiring a freelancer for jobs where company proprietary information is shared. We use Adobe Sign which is great for getting NDA's filled out and signed, however, I am not able to do that as freelancers cannot share their email address due to Upwork policies, which is understandable and fine.

Has anyone found a way around it, we rather avoid sending a pdf that the freelancer will need to edit with a PDF editor? 

Is there not an Upwork email address for each freelancer similar to the Hide My Email feature of Apple? 

Thanks!

Stefania 

[petra_r · Accepted solution]

---

Stefania P wrote:

Hello, it is a required procedure at our company to send NDA before hiring a freelancer for jobs where company proprietary information is shared. We use Adobe Sign which is great for getting NDA's filled out and signed, however, I am not able to do that as freelancers cannot share their email address due to Upwork policies, which is understandable and fine.

---

Actually, the freelancers CAN give you their email address for the purpose of accessing the NDA.

This kind of situation is specifically excluded from the ban of sharing email addresses. Here is the post which explains it and the specific wording is:

quote:

Because the Terms of Service changes are about preventing off-platform communication (rather than blocking freelancers from reviewing projects in advance), we are making the following exception:

Users may share email addresses for the sole purpose of providing access to a system that contains information about the project. If the system can be accessed without sharing an email address (such as via a link), it should be shared that way.  

If an email address is provided, it should not be used for any communications, including discussions about the project, until a contract is in place. Off-platform communication creates a risk of scam, fraud, other harmful behaviors, and can lead to circumvention, which is a violation of our Terms of Service. 

[logline]

There is another problem regarding Non-disclosure Agreements that I have just encountered.

The job was to edit a highly sensitive mental health report on a particular patient for a psychologist/counsellor at an hourly rate. I input my time manually because had I used the time-clock tool, automatic snapshots would have been taken of my desktop, which would have contravened my Non-disclosure Agreement. For reasons of extreme privacy, I also emailed the finished work directly to my client, rather than submit it on the Upwork portal in the usual fashion. Subsequently, Upwork has chosen to not pay me because my time was manually recorded, despite my client being perfectly happy with the work and he had not made any application for any refund. Now I am in a battle to have the refund reversed so that I can be paid. 

[NikolaS]

Hi Margaret,

Thank you for reaching out to us. I checked and it seems that you are already in correspondence with our team on your support ticket. Please allow more time for our team to review your case and respond accordingly to your ticket. You will be notified of their response.

[prestonhunter]

re: "Subsequently, Upwork has chosen to not pay me because my time was manually recorded, despite my client being perfectly happy with the work and he had not made any application for any refund. Now I am in a battle to have the refund reversed so that I can be paid. "

Manual time is not covered by Upwork Payment Protection.

If there is an issue with you getting paid, that is between you and the client.

If the client's credit card could not be charged initially, you won't get paid or those hours because you logged the time manually.

You may contact the client and ask her to pay you using a bonus payment.

If the client does not pay you as expected, I advise you to stop working for her.

There is no "sensitive medical health report" exception for Upwork Payment Protection. Upwork Payment Protection works the way that it works.

Do you have any remaining questions about this?

[petra_r]

---

Margaret M wrote:

Subsequently, Upwork has chosen to not pay me because my time was manually recorded, despite my client being perfectly happy with the work and he had not made any application for any refund. Now I am in a battle to have the refund reversed so that I can be paid. 

---

You misunderstand what happened...

It was your client who decided not to pay for your hours. 

When your client failed to pay for your hours, Upwork declined to pay you out of their own pocket, which they would have done had you tracked your time according to the terms of hourly protection.

There was no refund. The client never paid in the first place. Upwork just call it a refund.