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Product GPS-10294 | about 2 days ago

You’ve had comments deleted before for this kind of thing, but in case it wasn’t clear, you’re crossing the line into outright spam here. Not cool.

News - SparkFun Gets a Subpoena | about 2 weeks ago

This is kind of a gray area. We don’t currently have a delete-your-account feature, although we do disable accounts and scrub the data associated directly with them on request.

I think we’re probably always going to keep some record of a given order. We may wind up defining a policy and site features whereby users are able to say “delete as much of what you know about me as is reasonable”, and explicitly delineate the set of things which will be retained.

A lot of this just really hasn’t come up until recently; there’s a whole set of conversations we’ll be having internally.

News - SparkFun Gets a Subpoena | about 2 weeks ago

Take it up with Gruber. :)

News - SparkFun Gets a Subpoena | about 2 weeks ago

Bingo.

News - SparkFun Gets a Subpoena | about 2 weeks ago

A link in the formatting help to a more detailed guide might also be nice.

Yeah, good call. I’ll add one.

News - SparkFun Gets a Subpoena | about 2 weeks ago

If not, it seems like the easiest way to avoid such situations is to delete personally identifiable information as soon as it is no longer needed for business purposes.

This is a bit trickier than it sounds at first. There’s always a business case for people being able to log in with an existing account and re-use addresses the next time they order, or look at their order history, for example. The incentives for us to retain the details of any given order are also pretty strong, for all kinds of reasons – processing returns, basic reporting on what we’re selling where, etc. We’d be considerably worse at customer service, tech support, accounting, shipping, and a whole pile of other things if we didn’t store order data.

That said, we’re planning to make it possible to place an order without registering an account (that we haven’t yet is just a matter of the time to write the code), and this episode has got us thinking very carefully about what data we retain long-term.

News - SparkFun Gets a Subpoena | about 2 weeks ago

Edit: I wrote “5.” but the formatting renders it as “1.”. Not what I meant.

One of Markdown’s more irritating quirks. You can escape the . (see source of your comment now) and it’ll render as a regular number.

News - Fast and Malleable | about 2 weeks ago

I think Sparkfun gets it about as “right” as possible, in that even for parts that aren’t made anymore, or for those which have been upgraded into new parts or versions, the blogs and documentation for those old parts remains on the website, intact, where it always was.

This is an area where I’m convinced we can do at least a little better. I’m working on some basic tools right now for unifying documentation between different revisions of a product, and we’ve got ideas in the pipeline for displaying relationships between items more clearly.

News - Final Soldering Competiti… | last month

Next time you’re in town, give IT a holler and we can do the whole Boulder County Beer Circuit.

Maybe not all at once though. It’s a pretty long circuit.

News - Final Soldering Competiti… | last month

They’re getting pretty broad distribution these days.