Legal
Privacy Policy
Last updated: August 2026
Who we are
This site is run by Fullest Engineering Limited, trading as Ideambox, Room A406, 4F, No. 92, Section 3, Jianguo N. Rd, Zhongshan District, Taipei City, 10482, Taiwan. We decide how the personal data described here is used, which makes us the data controller for it.
For anything in this policy — including any of the rights below — write to pedro@ideambox.com and a person will answer.
This policy covers ideambox.com in all nine languages we publish it in.
What you give us
The contact form asks for your name, email address and a description of your project, and optionally your company, country, the service you are interested in, the stage you are at, your first production quantity, your target production date, what documentation you have today and an approximate budget bracket. The newsletter form asks only for your email address. Both require you to tick a consent box before they will send. The optional field beside a reference-document download asks only for your email address; what leaving it does is described below.
That is the whole list. There is no phone field and no file upload anywhere on this site — if an older version of this policy told you otherwise, it was wrong.
Reference documents. When you download one of the reference PDFs there is an optional field for your email address. Leaving it subscribes you to Hardware Notes: practical notes on prototyping, electronics, suppliers and manufacturing decisions, and a message when a reference document is revised. The download works whether or not you fill it in, so nothing is withheld if you would rather not. We send a confirmation immediately, every message carries a one-click unsubscribe, and the list is never shared. We keep the address until you unsubscribe, which you can also do by writing to pedro@ideambox.com.
What we collect without asking you to type it
When you submit either form, the notification that reaches us carries your IP address, your browser's user-agent string and the time you sent it, alongside what you wrote. We use these to tell real enquiries from automated abuse.
The same submission sends your IP address to Google as part of the reCAPTCHA spam check — once from your browser and once from our server when we verify the result. There is no way to submit the form without this happening; it is what keeps the inbox usable.
Our component-search tool limits how often one visitor can query it. It identifies you by a salted one-way hash of your IP address, so the address itself is never written to our disk.
If you accept analytics, Google Analytics also collects your IP address, the pages you view, and general device and location information. If you do not, none of that happens.
Cookies and similar storage
A fresh page on this site loads nothing from any third party. No analytics, no fonts, no trackers — the first request to anyone other than us happens only when you do something that needs it.
| Name | Kind | Lifetime | What it does | Set by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
ideambox-locale | cookie | 1 year | Remembers the language you chose so the site opens in it next time. | Ours |
idb-analytics-consent | localStorage | until you clear it | Stores your analytics choice — the reason we stop asking. | Ours |
idb.doc.email, idb.doc.skipped | localStorage | until you clear it | Remembers that you already answered the download question, so we stop asking. | Ours |
ideambox_gerber_viewer_prefs, ideambox_gerber_layer_colors | cookie | 1 year | Only on the Gerber viewer: your chosen background and layer colours, so the tool looks the same next visit. | Ours |
_ga, _ga_S5HE71X2R8 | cookie | 2 years | Google Analytics. Set only after you accept, and deleted if you refuse. | |
_GRECAPTCHA | cookie | 6 months | Google reCAPTCHA anti-spam. Set when you start filling in a form. |
Analytics, and your choice
We use Google Analytics 4 to see which pages are actually read and which are ignored. We ask first. Until you accept, no request is made to Google's servers and no analytics cookie exists — refusing, or simply ignoring the banner, leaves you unmeasured.
If you refuse, we also delete any _ga cookies already in your browser, including any set before we introduced this choice. You can change your mind either way at any time through the Cookie settings link in the footer of every page.
Google processes this data as our processor and may transfer it to the United States. What we receive is aggregate reporting, not a way to identify you by name.
What we load from other companies, and when
Google reCAPTCHA loads when you start filling in a form, and checks your submission for spam. Google receives your IP address, browser details and behavioural signals from that page.
Calendly loads when you click a link to book a call, and shows its own booking form and its own cookie notice inside the popup. Until you click, Calendly knows nothing about you.
Our engineering viewers — the 3D CAD, Gerber and PCB tools — pull their rendering engines from the public code networks unpkg, esm.sh and jsDelivr the first time you open one. Those networks see your IP address and which library you loaded.
The files you open in those tools are read inside your browser and never uploaded. We do not receive them and neither does anyone else.
What happens to your message after you send it
Enquiries reach our email and are answered by a person. We run our own customer-relationship system over that mailbox: it reads the messages, stores them, and groups them into conversations so nothing gets lost.
As part of that, the subject line, the sender's name or address and an excerpt of the message body are sent to Anthropic, whose Claude model sorts each conversation by type and urgency. Anthropic acts as our processor and does not use this correspondence to train its models. Automated sorting never decides anything about you on its own — a person reads every genuine enquiry.
Why we are allowed to do this
We answer your enquiry and keep the resulting correspondence because you asked us to and because we have a legitimate interest in running the studio and remembering who we have spoken to. We send the newsletter only on your consent, given by ticking the box. We run analytics only on your consent, given through the banner. We run spam checks and rate limits on our legitimate interest in keeping the site usable. Where we are legally obliged to keep records — tax, for instance — we do.
How long we keep it
Business correspondence stays as long as the relationship might reasonably continue, because a project enquiry can go quiet for a year and come back. Newsletter subscriptions last until you unsubscribe. Rate-limit records last minutes. Analytics data follows Google's retention setting for the property.
If you would rather we did not keep something, ask and we will delete it.
Who else sees it
We do not sell or rent personal data. It reaches other companies only where they run part of this service for us: IONOS hosts the site and our email, Google supplies reCAPTCHA and Analytics, Calendly runs the booking form, and Anthropic classifies correspondence. Several of them are based in, or transfer data to, the United States; those transfers rely on the standard contractual clauses in their terms.
Your rights
If you are in the EU, the UK or another place with comparable law, you can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict or stop a particular use, object to processing we base on legitimate interest, and ask for your data in a portable form. Where we rely on your consent — the newsletter, analytics — you can withdraw it at any time, and doing so is as easy as giving it was.
Ask by emailing pedro@ideambox.com. We do not charge for this and we will not make it difficult. If you think we have handled your data badly, you are entitled to complain to the data-protection authority where you live.
Newsletter
Every newsletter we send carries a one-click unsubscribe that your mail app will show above the message. You can also simply reply and ask to be removed, or write to pedro@ideambox.com. We act on it either way.
Changes to this policy
When what we do changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. This version replaces one that described analytics as something that might be switched on. It is switched on, it asks first, and everything above says plainly what that means.