Privacy Policy

OSA Electronics assumes the following responsibilities:

  • Protecting all data generated by and provided to us by our users from being stolen, compromised, or used in violation with this policy.
  • Never selling user-provided and user-generated data for financial gain or competitive advantage.
  • Providing transparency for our users into what data we collect and what we do with it including what access third parties have to user data and for what purpose.
  • Informing users if their data is compromised, either by failure to protect data or by order to surrender data to a legal authority, to the fullest extent we are lawfully able.

What we know about you

If you register an account with OSA Electronics, we’ll have access to your e-mail address and any additional contact information you choose to provide us. If you place an order, we retain a record of the contents of the order, delivery and billing address information, and any communication you might have with our customer support team about the order. If you use features such as commenting, in-stock notifications, and comment reply notifications, we retain record of this fact.

If you browse osaelectronics.com, with or without a login, we know for a limited time that a user at your IP address has visited pages on the site.

We collect data on what products and content you browse in order to offer better value to you through personalized email, and to see which products/content are the most useful to you.

When and how we send email

We send email to users when orders are placed, paused, shipped. We may be in contact when an order requires payment before shipping or if other issues prevent us from fulfilling an order. We will send you email to verify your email address or if you request a password reset. We may send you email to request reviews of our products or feedback on your experience with our website, products, or customer support.

We will notify users if we believe their privacy has been compromised, if it is within our power to do so. For example, if we discover a customer’s account user login information has been exposed elsewhere on the web, or if we are compelled to disclose information to law enforcement.

We offer a set of opt-in email subscriptions for things such as newsletters, in-stock notifications for products, and comment reply notifications. You can control your subscriptions (when logged into your account) under your profile. All new customers are signed up to our main newsletter by default, and OSA Electronics may at any time add all new and all existing customers to existing and new newsletters at our discretion.

We may occasionally send you an email that you did not request or trigger with an action of any kind in order to promote a certain aspect of our site, products, or services.

When you talk to our support teams

If you email us, chat with us, or call us on the telephone for support we can and most of the time will record the interaction. This is done so for training and audit purposes and the private conversations between customers and support staff are never sold to or shared with third parties (except when a third party tool, such as email or our chat service, is used to make the interaction possible).

Logging and log retention

In order to understand traffic to our sites and diagnose technical problems, we log individual web requests. These logs include time of request, individual IP address, referer, and user agent strings. We may retain these logs for up to 60 days, although individually-identifying information will be obscured after one week.

In order to prevent fraud and detect malicious behavior, we log IP addresses for specific actions, such as creating a customer account and placing an order. This information is automatically deleted after no more than 60 days.

Except in the case of malicious traffic, we will not share log data with any third party, unless compelled by legal process to do so.

Cookies, Tags, Tracking Pixels, and HTTPS

We use cookies, tags, and tracking pixels to know when users are logged in to OSA Electronics services and to track preferences such as display currencies and the rendering of product menus.

Our analytics software, use tags/tracking pixels to help keep track of how many unique visitors we’re getting, where they come from, and how they navigate our site, unless you’re browsing with Do Not Track enabled. We use this information to inform site improvements.

We do our best to serve all content securely over HTTPS.

Third Party Services

Shipping Providers and Export Control

We offer shipping through third parties: DHL, Fedex, and the Spanish Postal Service (via a service called PAQ). We pass delivery addresses, phone numbers, and invoices to these companies to the extent required for quoting shipping prices and successful delivery of orders.

We comply with Spanish export regulations and authorities.

Payment Providers

Credit Card payments are processed through Stripe. All credit card data including the cardholder name, credit card number, expiration date, CVV, and full billing address are sent to Stripe via an API for processing. Details regarding what products a customer is purchasing and other demographic information are not sent to Stripe.

PayPal is offered as a payment method. When using PayPal on osaelectronics.com a user must provide their PayPal email address. The user will then be directed to paypal.com to complete their payment, after which they will be redirected to sparkfun.com to complete the order.

Analytics

OSA Electronics uses Google Analytics and Facebook to track aggregate behavior of visitors on osaelectronics.com.

Google Universal Analytics is a service hosted on Google’s servers, and is our primary analytics tool. It is activated by a JavaScript snippet that loads on every page to send visitor behavioral information to Google. OSA Electronics uses this information to understand how visitors use our site. Sometimes OSA Electronics will run A/B tests, where Google Analytics will track cookies set on users to divide them into groups that get slightly different pages to see which perform better. Visitors who have Do Not Track enabled will not have any information sent to Google’s servers for use in analytics.

OSA Electronics also utilizes Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting. This means we combine personally identifiable information about your SparkFun account, browsing, and shopping habits and merge it with Google’s tracking cookies, all of which goes to Google. This is enabled by default for all visitors to SparkFun.com. You can opt out of this by enabling Do Not Track headers in your browser or installing and enabling the Google Analytics Opt-Out Browser Add-on.

Social Media

We maintain accounts on various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, GitHub, YouTube and Instagram. While some of these platforms are themselves invasive of user privacy, we will do our best to apply the principles outlined in the rest of this policy to our use of social media.

We do not make use of third-party social media badges or widgets which function as trackers.

Ticketing/CRM

We use Desk.com, Salesforce, and HubSpot to manage and prioritize customer contacts, including those by email, phone, chat, and social media.

Questions?

If you have any questions or feedback regarding this privacy policy, including if you feel OSA Electronics or someone within the OSA Electronics community has violated it, or if you are concerned about SparkFun’s general philosophy toward user privacy, please contact us at privacy@osaelectronics.com or post a public comment below.