Privacy Policy

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use fill out contact forms or enter any personal information on our site.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our website, mobile applications and other products and services collectively as “Services.” .

Please note that this Privacy Policy does not apply to any of our products or services that have a separate privacy policy.

Below we explain how we collect, use, and share information about you, along with the choices that you have with respect to that information.

Information We Collect

We only collect information about you if we have a reason to do so–for example, to provide our Services, to communicate with you, or to make our Services better.

We collect information in three ways: if and when you provide information to us, automatically through operating our Services, and from outside sources. Let’s go over the information that we collect.

Information You Provide to Us

It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us. The amount and type of information depends on the context and how we use the information. Here are some examples:

• Basic Account Information: We ask for basic information from you in order to set up your account. For example, we require individuals who sign up for a WordPress.com account to provide a username and email address–and that’s it. You may provide us with more information–like your name–but we don’t require that information to create a WordPress.com account.
• Public Profile Information: If you have an account with us, we collect the information that you provide for your public profile. For example, if you have a WordPress.com account, your username is part of that public profile, along with any other information you put into your public profile, such as a photo or an “About Me” description. Your public profile information is just that–public–so please keep that in mind when deciding what information you would like to include.
• Content Information: Depending on the Services you use, you may also provide us with information about you in draft and published content (such as for your website or your Polldaddy survey). For example, if you write a blog post that includes biographic information about you, we will have that information, and so will anyone with access to the Internet if you choose to publish the post publicly. This might be obvious to you…but it’s not to everyone!
• Credentials: Depending on the Services you use, you may provide us with credentials for your website (like SSH, FTP, and SFTP username and password). For example, Jetpack and VaultPress users may provide us with these credentials in order to use our one-click restore feature if there is a problem with their site, or to allow us to troubleshoot problems on their site more quickly.
• Communications With Us (Hi There!): You may also provide us information when you respond to surveys, communicate with our Happiness Engineers about a support question, or post a question about your site in our public forums.

Information We Collect Automatically

We also collect some information automatically:

• Log Information: Like most online service providers, we collect information that web browsers, mobile devices, and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, IP address, unique device identifiers, language preference, referring site, the date and time of access, operating system, and mobile network information. We collect log information when you use our Services–for example, when you create or make changes to your website on WordPress.com.
• Usage Information: We collect information about your usage of our Services
• Location Information: We may determine the approximate location of your device from your IP address. We collect and use this information to, for example, calculate how many people visit our Services from certain geographic regions.
• Stored Information: We may access information stored on your mobile device via our mobile app. We access this stored information through your device operating system’s permissions. For example, if you give us permission to access the photographs on your mobile device’s camera roll, our Services may access the photos stored on your device when you upload a really amazing photograph of the sunrise to your website.
• Information from Cookies & Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites and emails. as well as track and understand email campaign effectiveness and to deliver targeted ads. For more information about our use of cookies and other technologies for tracking, including how you can control the use of cookies.

Information We Collect from Other Sources

We may also get information, such as a mailing address, from third party services about individuals who are not yet our users (…but we hope will be!), which we may use, for example, for marketing and advertising purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our services.

How And Why We Use Information

Purposes for Using Information

We use information about you as mentioned above and for the purposes listed below:

• To provide our Services–for example, to set up and maintain your account, host your website, backup and restore your website, or charge you for any of our paid Services;
• To further develop and improve our Services–for example by adding new features that we think our users will enjoy or will help them to create and manage their websites more efficiently;
• To monitor and analyze trends and better understand how users interact with our Services, which helps us improve our Services and make them easier to use;
• To monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, protect the security of our Services, detect and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities, fight spam, and protect the rights and property, which may result in us declining a transaction or the use of our Services;
• To communicate with you, for example through an email, about offers and promotions offered  and others we think will be of interest to you, solicit your feedback, or keep you up to date.

Legal Bases for Collecting and Using Information

A note here for those in the European Union about our legal grounds for processing information about you under EU data protection laws, which is that our use of your information is based on the grounds that:

(1) The use is necessary in order to fulfill our commitments to you under our Terms of Service or other agreements with you or is necessary to administer your account–for example, in order to enable access to our website on your device or charge you for a paid plan; or

(2) The use is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation; or

(3) The use is necessary in order to protect your vital interests or those of another person; or

(4) We have a legitimate interest in using your information–for example, to provide and update our Services, to improve our Services so that we can offer you an even better user experience, to safeguard our Services, to communicate with you, to measure, gauge, and improve the effectiveness of our advertising, and better understand user retention and attrition, to monitor and prevent any problems with our Services, and to personalize your experience; or

(5) You have given us your consent–for example before we place certain cookies on your device and access and analyze them later on, as described in our Cookie Policy.

Sharing Information

How We Share Information

We do not sell our users’ private personal information.

We share information about you in the limited circumstances spelled out below and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy:

• Subsidiaries, Employees, and Independent Contractors: We may disclose information about you to our subsidiaries, our employees, and individuals who are our independent contractors that need to know the information in order to help us provide our Services or to process the information on our behalf. We require our subsidiaries, employees, and independent contractors to follow this Privacy Policy for personal information that we share with them.
• Third Party Vendors: We require vendors to agree to privacy commitments in order to share information with them. Other vendors are listed in our more specific policies.
• Legal Requests: We may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request. For more information on how we respond to requests for information about WordPress.com users, please see our
• To Protect Rights, Property, and Others: We may disclose information about you when we believe in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights.  third parties, or the public at large. For example, if we have a good faith belief that there is an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury we will do our upmost to protect the public while being responsible with any data available.
• With Your Consent: We may share and disclose information with your consent or at your direction. For example, we may share your information with third parties with which you authorize us to do so, such as the social media services that you connect to your site through our Publicize feature.
• Aggregated or De-Identified Information: We may share information that has been aggregated or reasonably de-identified, so that the information could not reasonably be used to identify you. For instance, we may publish aggregate statistics about the use of our Services and we may share a hashed version of your email address to facilitate customized ad campaigns on other platforms.
• Other Site Owners: If you have a WordPress.com account and leave a comment on a site that uses our Services (like a site created on WordPress.com or a site running Jetpack), your IP address and the email address associated with your WordPress.com account may be shared with the administrator(s) of the site where you left the comment.
• Published Support Requests: And if you send us a request (for example, via a support email or one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish that request in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Information Shared Publicly

Information that you choose to make public is–you guessed it–disclosed publicly.

That means, of course, that information like your public profile, posts, other content that you make public on your website, and your “Likes” and comments on other websites, are all available to others–and we hope you get a lot of views!

For example, the photo that you upload to your public profile, or a default image if you haven’t uploaded one, is your Globally Recognized Avatar, or Gravatar–get it? :). Your Gravatar, along with other public profile information, will display with the comments and “Likes” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your WordPress.com account. Your Gravatar + public profile information may also display with your comments, “Likes,” and other interactions on websites that use our Gravatar service, if the email address associated with your account with us is the same as the email address that you use on the other website.

We also provide a “Firehose” stream of public data (like posts and comments) from sites that use our Services to provide that data to Firehose subscribers, who may view and analyze the content (all subject to our Terms of Service), but do not have rights to re-publish it, publicly.

Public information may also be indexed by search engines or used by third parties.

Please keep all of this in mind when deciding what you would like to share.

How Long We Keep Information

We generally discard information about you when we no longer need the information for the purposes for which we collect and use it–which are described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information–and we are not legally required to continue to keep it.

Security

While no online service is 100% secure, we work very hard to protect information about you against unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction, and take reasonable measures to do so, such as monitoring our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.

Choices

You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:

• Limit the Information that You Provide: If you have an account with us, you can choose not to provide the optional account information, profile information, and transaction and billing information. Please keep in mind that if you do not provide this information, certain features of our Services–for example, paid, premium themes–may not be accessible.
• Limit Access to Information On Your Mobile Device: Your mobile device operating system should provide you with the ability to discontinue our ability to collect stored information or location information via our mobile apps. If you do so, you may not be able to use certain features (like adding a location to a photograph, for example).
• Opt-Out of Electronic Communications: You may opt out of receiving promotional messages from us. Just follow the instructions in those messages. If you opt out of promotional messages, we may still send you other messages, like those about your account and legal notices.

Your Rights

If you are located in certain countries, including those that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (AKA the “GDPR”), data protection laws give you rights with respect to your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:

• Request access to your personal data;
• Request correction or deletion of your personal data;
• Object to our use and processing of your personal data;
• Request that we limit our use and processing of your personal data; and
• Request portability of your personal data.

You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to do that, or you would like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll down to How to Reach Us to, well, find out how to reach us.

EU individuals also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.

Controllers and Responsible Companies

Automattic’s Services are worldwide. Different Automattic companies are the controller (or co-controller) of personal information, which means that they are the company responsible for processing that information, based on the particular service and the location of the individual using our Services.

Depending on the Services you use, more than one company may be the controller of your personal data. Generally, the “controller” is the Automattic company that entered into the contract with you under the Terms of Service for the the product or service you use. In addition, Automattic Inc., our US-based company, is the controller for some of the processing activities across all of our Services worldwide.

The chart below explains the controllers for processing your personal information. We use the term “Designated Countries” to refer to Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and all countries located in the European continent.

How to Reach Us

If you have a question about this Privacy Policy, or you would like to contact us about any of the rights mentioned in the Your Rights section above, please email [email protected]

Other Things You Should Know (Keep Reading!)

Transferring Information

Because Automattic’s Services are offered worldwide, the information about you that we process when you use the Services in the EU may be used, stored, and/or accessed by individuals operating outside the European Economic Area (EEA) who work for us, other members of our group of companies, or third party data processors. This is required for the purposes listed in the How and Why We Use Information section above. When providing information about you to entities outside the EEA, we will take appropriate measures to ensure that the recipient protects your personal information adequately in accordance with this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include:

• In the case of entities based in other countries outside the EEA, entering into European Commission approved standard contractual arrangements with them.

You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.

Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others

Ads appearing on any of our Services may be delivered by advertising networks. Other parties may also provide analytics services via our Services. These ad networks and analytics providers may set tracking technologies (like cookies) to collect information about your use of our Services and across other websites and online services. These technologies allow these third parties to recognize your device to compile information about you or others who use your device. This information allows us and other companies to, among other things, analyze and track usage, determine the popularity of certain content, and deliver advertisements that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Automattic and does not cover the collection of information by any third party advertisers or analytics providers.

Third Party Software

If you’d like to use third party plugins, WooCommerce extensions that enable services provided by third parties, or other third party software, please keep in mind that when you interact with them you may provide information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. We don’t own or control these third parties and they have their own rules about collection, use and sharing of information, which you should review.

Visitors to Our Users’ Websites

We also process information about visitors to our users’ websites, on behalf of our users and in accordance with our user agreements. Please note that our processing of that information on behalf of our users for their websites isn’t covered by this Privacy Policy. We encourage our users to post a privacy policy that accurately describes their practices on data collection, use, and sharing of personal information.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change our Privacy Policy from time to time and all changes will be listed below