Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At Automattic, we have a few fundamental principles:

• We are thoughtful about the personal information we ask you to provide and the personal information that we collect about you through the operation of our services.
• We store personal information for only as long as we have a reason to keep it.
• We aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what information on your website is shared publicly (or kept private), indexed by search engines, and permanently deleted.
• We help protect you from overreaching government demands for your personal information.
• We aim for full transparency on how we gather, use, and share your personal information.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.

Who We Are and What This Policy Covers

Howdy! We are the folks behind a variety of products and services designed to allow anyone — from bloggers, to photographers, small business owners, and enterprises — to take full advantage of the power and promise of the open web. Our mission is to democratize publishing and commerce so that anyone with a story can tell it, and anyone can turn their great idea into a livelihood. We believe in powering the open Internet with code that is open source and are proud to say that the vast majority of our work is available under the General Public License (“GPL”). Unlike most other services, because our GPL code is public, you can actually download and take a look at that code to see how it works.

• Our websites (including automattic.com, wordpress.com, vip.wordpress.com, jetpack.com, woocommerce.com, crowdsignal.com, gravatar.com, intensedebate.com, vaultpress.com, akismet.com, simplenote.com, simperium.com, leandomainsearch.com, cloudup.com, longreads.com, and happy.tools);
• Our mobile applications (including the WordPress mobile app for Android and iOS);
• Our other Automattic products, services, and features that are available on or through our websites (for example, WordPress.com plans, Recurring Payments, Simple Payments, WordPress.com VIP, Jetpack, the WooCommerce Services Extension, Gravatar, the IntenseDebate comment management system, Akismet plans, Simplenote, Simperium, Cloudup, Longreads, and Happy Tools); and
• Other users’ websites that use our Services, while you are logged in to your account with us.

Throughout this Privacy Policy we’ll refer to our websites, mobile applications, and other products and services collectively as “Services.” And if you’d like to learn more about which Automattic company is the controller of information about you, take a look at the section below on Controllers and Responsible Companies.

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 an email address along with a username or name, depending on the service – and that’s it. You may provide us with more information – like your address and other information you want to share – 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.
• Billing and Contact Information: If you buy something from us –a subscription to a WordPress.com plan, a premium theme, a custom domain, or some fun Longreads swag, for example – or pay fees to a site owner (for example via Recurring Payments or Simple Payments), you will provide additional personal and payment information, such as your name, credit card information, and contact information.
• Happy Tools Information: If you are a Happy Tools user, you will provide us with information to make use of the Service’s features. For example, you might enter timezone and location information, company information, and contact information.
• Ecommerce Site Information: If you use our ecommerce Services to sell products or services to others through your site (including Stores on WordPress.com, the WooCommerce Services extension, or other purchases on WooCommerce.com), you will have to create a WordPress.com account or connect an existing account and, for some of our ecommerce Services, provide your site URL. You may also provide us with information about your financial account to set up a payments integration, such as the email address for your Stripe or PayPal account or your bank account information.
• 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 Crowdsignal 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, post a question about your site in our public forums, or sign up for a newsletter like the one we send through Longreads. When you communicate with us via form, email, phone, WordPress.com comment, or otherwise, we store a copy of our communications (including any call recordings as permitted by applicable law).