Privacy Policy

Changes on April 30th, 2019:
Updated policy to incorporate GDPR and California’s “Shine the Light” law compliance.

Changes on January 30th, 2015:
Added a paragraph describing the privacy implications of Whitelabel Communities Powered by Hackster.io.

Changes on October 25th, 2021:
Updated policy for data transfers outside the European Economic Area.

Hackster Inc. (also referred to ‘Hackster, ‘we’, ‘us’ or ‘our’ in this Statement) is a member of a world-wide group of companies of which AVNET Inc. (based in the USA) is the parent company. Protecting the security and privacy of your personal data is important to us. Avnet Inc., 2211 South 47th Street, Phoenix, AZ 85034, USA is the data controller. On this website Hackster.io C/O Avent Inc., 2550 N. First Street, Suite 350, San Jose, CA 95131, USA is a data processor.

The following privacy policy shall apply in addition to all our Terms of Service. To ensure fair and transparent processing of your personal data and compliance with applicable laws on data protection, we provide you with the following information:

What personal data is collected and/or is processed by Hackster?

We collect the following data you provide us (for example in account registrations or prize draws) as well as your IP address:

  • Username
  • Email address
  • First name and last name
  • Phone number
  • Address (street, zip, city, country)

How do we use your personal data?

  • Logging of access to our websites (IP address) for statistical purposes, optimize, improve and further develop our website, for instance by analysing user behaviour with respect to dates and times and the data volume called up on our website.
  • Communication about products, services and projects e.g. by responding to inquiries or requests.
  • To email you newsletters as required.
  • Advertising products that are or may be of interest for you.
  • Administrating and performing customer surveys, marketing campaigns, market analysis, contests, or other promotional activities or events.
  • Maintaining and protecting the security of our products, services and websites, preventing and detecting errors through the log files, security threats, fraud or other criminal or malicious activities.
  • Ensuring compliance with legal obligations (such as record keeping obligations), compliance screening obligations, and Hackster’s policies or industry standards; and
  • Solving disputes, enforce our contractual agreements and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

We are entitled to use and process your personal data for these purposes by virtue of the performance of a contractual relationship, a legal obligation or the legitimate interest of Hackster or third party such as but not limited to a real economic interest, direct marketing. If explicitly provided by you, consent can also be a legal basis for Hackster to process or use your personal data. This consent can be withdrawn at any time with effect for the future.

If the legal ground for processing your personal data is no longer available, Hackster may only further process your personal data where there is another legal ground for the processing.

Does Hackster share your personal data with a third party or country?

We do not rent or sell your Personal Information to anyone. We may share and disclose information (including Personal Information) about our customers in the following limited circumstances:

Hackster may transfer your personal data with other Avnet companies, but only if and to the extent, such transfer is strictly required for the purposes mentioned above. The other Avnet companies act only upon our instructions and are contractually bound to act in compliance with applicable data protection law and to provide appropriate technical and organisational security measures.

If legally permitted to do so, Hackster may transfer personal data to courts, law enforcement authorities, regulators or attorneys if necessary to comply with the law or for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

In connection with the operation of our websites and the services provided through our websites, Hackster works with service providers (so-called data processors), such as hosting or IT maintenance, which only act upon instructions of Hackster and are contractually bound to act in compliance with applicable data protection law and to provide appropriate technical and organizational security measures.

Recipients of EU citizen personal data may possibly be located in countries outside of the European Union /European Economic Area (“third countries”), in which applicable laws do not offer the same level of data protection as the laws of your home country.

In such cases and unless permitted otherwise by applicable law, Hackster is committed to take measures in order to ensure the recipients in the third country provides an adequate level of protection.

As far as such data transfers involve recipients in countries outside the European Union or outside the European Economic Area (“Third Countries”), we will ensure that the transfers will be made in compliance with the EEA data protection provisions, to ensure that an adequate level of data protection equivalent to the GDPR is maintained.

Such safeguards could either be an adequacy decision by which the European Union has deemed the country in which the recipient is located to have adequate data protection laws in place, or the execution of EU Standard Contractual Clauses (also known as EU Model Clauses) with the recipient, or the implementation of Binding Corporate Rules (“BCRs”) by the recipient.

Whitelabel Communities Powered by Hackster.io

Hackster provides hosted services for other companies (called "Platforms" on Hackster.io) that want their own project-sharing site. These sites use a subset of the projects and profile data that is available on Hackster.io. Consequently, if you're following a specific platform, or create a project and tag it with that platform, or respect, or comment on such a project, your profile information will appear on that platform's Whitelabel project-sharing site (if they have one). It's important to note that we do not share your data with these companies in any way; all of it remains on our servers.

If the data is not provided by you, what is the source from which your personal data originates?

Hackster may collect the above mentioned personal data from other group companies, suppliers, customers, publically available information on internet, social media or any other platform or a system/application used by Hackster.

How long will Hackster store your personal data?

Unless explicitly indicated otherwise at the time of the collection of the personal data, we erase your personal data if the retention of the personal data is no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed and to the extent the processing of personal data is no longer necessary for compliance with a legal obligation under applicable law (e.g. tax or commercial law).

Right of access to and rectification or erasure of personal data, restriction of processing, right to object to processing and right to data portability.

Applicable EU data protection law provides you with the right to:

  • Obtain from Hackster information on your personal data Hackster holds and/or processes about you and receive a copy of your personal data being processed in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format,
  • Obtain from Hackster the rectification of inaccurate personal data,
  • Obtain from Hackster the erasure of your personal data, unless processing of her/his personal data is necessary for compliance with applicable legal obligations,
  • Obtain from Hackster restriction of processing regarding her/his personal data,
  • Transmit your personal data which you actively provided to another recipient selected by you, and
  • Object, on grounds relating to your particular situation, to processing of your personal data based on a legitimate interest of Hackster or a third party.

If you are a resident of the European Economic Area and you would like to exercise your data subject rights under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you can email our privacy@hackster.io. Our privacy team will examine your request and respond to you as quickly as possible.

California Privacy Rights

Under California law section 1798.83, Hackster.io users who are California residents may request certain information regarding the types of information shared by Hackster.io with third parties for their direct marketing purposes, and the identities of those third parties.

In addition, a business subject to California Business and Professions Code Section 22581 must allow California residents under age 18 who are registered users of online sites, services or applications to request and obtain removal of content or information they have publicly posted. Your request should include a detailed description of the specific content or information to be removed. Please be aware that your request does not guarantee complete or comprehensive removal of content or information posted online and that the law may not permit or require removal in certain circumstances.

If you are a California resident and would like a copy of this notice, please submit a written request to us at: privacy@hackster.io.

Marketing Preferences

You can opt-out of receiving certain promotional or marketing communications from us at any time, by using the unsubscribe link in the emails communications we send, or Exercise your Rights to: privacy@hackster.io.

If you instruct us to stop sending you product and service information and marketing messages it might take some time for all our systems and applications to be updated, so you might still get messages from us while we fully process your instruction.

Please note that instructing us to stop sending marketing messages will not stop our other communication with you, such as account conformations, password resets, or important updates to our contractual Terms.

Links to other websites

If any link is offered connecting to a third party website, it is as an accommodation to the respective third party site owner and without charge. Sites linked to and from this site are not necessarily under our control and we shall have no responsibilities or liabilities whatsoever for the content or privacy practices of any such linked site or any link or linking program at any time. We do not necessarily endorse companies (or related products or services) to or from which this site is linked. If you decide to access any of the third party sites linked to this site, you do so entirely at your own risk. We hereby disclaim any rights to trademarks, service marks, tradenames, logos, copyrights, patents, domain names or other intellectual property interests of third parties.

Data Privacy Contact

Hackster’s Data Protection Team provides support with any data privacy related questions, comments, concerns or complaints or in case a data subject wishes to exercise any of its data privacy related rights as mentioned above. Hackster’s Data Protection Team may be contacted at: privacy@hackster.io.

The Data Protection Officer of Avnet for Germany is Stefan Schindler, Stefan.Schindler@csr-legal.de.

Avnet’s Data Protection Team will use its best efforts to handle any requests or complaints brought to its attention. The data subject has got the right to approach the competent data protection authority with requests or complaints. A list of national data protection authorities is available here.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Hackster may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Hackster's sole discretion. However, if this Privacy Policy is changed in a material, adverse way, Hackster will post a notice advising of such change at the beginning of this policy and on the homepage for 30 days. Hackster encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy.

Hackster Avnet Legal | Version 1.3 - 10.2021