About ESP32.com and censorship

[ESP_Sprite]

Hi all,

If you watched the forum today, you may have seen some posts about FCC information that was posted and subsequently deleted by the mods. After this, a topic got started speculating about censorship about this forum. I have removed this topic, as it also contained references to the information.

The issue here is that the FCC information that got posted was of a module that we developed for a customer. As part of a business relationship with them, we usually have mutual NDAs, that have specific terms in them wrt what we can and cannot disclose.

The issue, now, is that the FCC information posted could be interpreted as sensitive information, as covered by the NDA, and this could lead us into legal trouble, as it being posted on a domain owned by us (ESP32.com) could be explained as us disclosing it. This is the reason the post got deleted. On top of that, there was a communication error: the moderator who deleted the topic explained this to the topic starter, but made a mistake and also deleted the explanation. This gave the impression of us randomly deleting topics we do not like, and we regret that.

As you may have noticed in the past, we put great value on everyone being able to say what they want here. In case we do need to remove information because of legal reasons, we normally do that in communication with the person who posted it.

Anyway, hope this explains what happened. Note that I may remove this post in the future as well, as not to confuse people who didn't see the event itself.

[luisonoff]

I believe that once the FCC makes that information PUBLICLY available (as it was the case with the information shared by rudi), and considering the FCC is not breaking any NDA of its own (with your client) by releasing it (I hope not), then this information is not protected anymore by your NDA and you could share it as well with everybody.
Because NDA (usually) just protect the information called confidential, and once that information can be found publicly and LEGALLY somewhere else (as it seems to be the case), and this fact can be proven, it stops being confidential.

I am not a lawyer but we have also signed many NDA and they all state this.

[ESP_Sprite]

I would think that as well, possibly some people on the business side are erring on the side of caution here. To be fair, if this was a module that was extremely relevant for the people on this forum, I'd've gone to bat to try to figure out exactly what we can disclose, but this is a company-internal module that is not available for sale anyway, so I don't think that's worth it here.

[seonroz]

This all sounds reasonable to me... thanks for the openness and honesty about what happened. Clearly no malice involved and the desire to go above and beyond to protect your clients interests is admirable!