Your privacy is critically important to us. At Website Hacked, we have a few fundamental principles:
Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates and clarifies these principles.
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 is to e-commerce to e-commerce permits us 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 download and take a look at that code to see how it works.
This Privacy Policy applies to information that we collect about you when you use:
This Privacy Policy also applies to information we collect when you apply for a job at Website Hacked or one of our subsidiaries.
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 Website Hacked 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, like Tumblr, 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 concerning that information.
We’ve decided to make this Privacy Policy available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license. You can grab a copy of this Privacy Policy and other legal documents on GitHub. You’re more than welcome to copy it, adapt it, and repurpose it for your use. Just make sure to revise the language so that your policy reflects your actual practices. If you do use it, we’d appreciate a credit and link to Website Hacked somewhere on your site.
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 this information from three sources: 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.
It’s probably no surprise that we collect information that you provide to us directly. Here are some examples:
We also collect some information automatically:
We may also get information about you from other sources. For example:
The information we receive depends on which services you use or authorize and what options are available.
Third-party services may also give us information, like mailing addresses for individuals who are not yet our users (but we hope will be!). We use this information for marketing purposes like postcards and other mailers advertising our Services.
We use information about you for the purposes listed below:
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 because:
We share information about you in limited circumstances, and with appropriate safeguards on your privacy. These are spelt out below, as well as in the section called Ads and Analytics Services Provided by Others:
We have a long-standing policy that we do not sell our users’ data. We aren’t a data broker, we don’t sell your personal information to data brokers, and we don’t sell your information to other companies that want to spam you with marketing emails.
We show ads on some of our users’ sites as well as some of our own, and the revenue they generate lets us offer free access to some of our Services so that money doesn’t become an obstacle to having a voice.
Under a new California law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), some personalized advertising you see online and on our services might be considered a “sale” even though we don’t share information that identifies you personally, like your name or email address, as part of our advertising program.
You have choices about these ads, learn more about them and our ads program.
Information that you choose to make public is — you guessed it — disclosed publicly.
That means 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 they 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, displays alongside the comments and “Likes” that you make on other users’ websites while logged in to your WordPress.com account. Your Gravatar and 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 is the same email address you use on the other website.
We also provide a “Firehose” stream of public data (like posts and comments) from some 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. Find out more about opting out of the Firehose for WordPress.com and Jetpack sites. 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 publicly.
We generally discard information about you when it’s no longer needed for the purposes for which we collect and use is — described in the section above on How and Why We Use Information — and we’re not legally required to keep it.
For example, we keep web server logs that record information about a visitor to one of Website Hacked’s websites, like the visitor’s IP address, browser type, and operating system, for approximately 30 days. We retain the logs for this period too, among other things, analyze traffic to Website Hacked’s websites and investigate issues if something goes wrong on one of our websites.
As another example, when you delete a post, page, or comment from your WordPress.com site, it stays in your Trash folder for thirty days in case you change your mind and would like to restore that content because starting from scratch is no fun. After the thirty days are up, the deleted content may remain on our backups and caches until purged.
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. We monitor our Services for potential vulnerabilities and attacks.
To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to enable our advanced security settings, like Two-Step Authentication.
You have several choices available when it comes to information about you:
To enhance the security of your account, we encourage you to enable our advanced security settings, like Two-Step Authentication.
If you are located in certain parts of the world, including California and countries that fall under the scope of the European General Data Protection Regulation (aka the “GDPR”), you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, like the right to request access to or deletion of your data.
European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
If you are located in a country that falls under the scope of the GDPR, data protection laws give you certain rights concerning your personal data, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the rights to:
You also have the right to make a complaint to a government supervisory authority.
The California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) requires us to provide California residents with some additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it.
The CCPA also requires us to provide a list of the “categories” of personal information we collect, as that term is defined in the law, so, here it is. In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information from California residents, depending on the Services used:
You can find more information about what we collect and sources of that information in the Information We Collect section above.
We collect personal information for the business and commercial purposes described in the How and Why We Use Information section. And we share this information with the categories of third parties described in the Sharing Information section.
If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the CCPA, subject to any exemptions provided by the law, including the right to:
You can find detailed metrics about Website Hacked’s compliance with these rights in our Privacy Report.
Our mission is to democratize publishing and commerce, and that means making our Services accessible to as many people as possible. We show ads on some of our users’ sites as well as some of our sites, and the revenue these ads generate lets us offer free access to some of our Services so that money doesn’t become an obstacle to having a voice. Our ads program also allows our users to earn revenue to support and grow their sites. As part of our advertising program, we and our users do use cookies to share certain device identifiers and information about your browsing activities with our advertising partners, and those advertising partners may use that information to show you personalized ads on some of our users’ sites and some of our own.
The personal information we share includes online identifiers; internet or other network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP address); and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address). These disclosures may be considered a “sale” of the information under the CCPA. We do not sell (or share) information through our ads program that identifies you personally, like your name or contact information. We don’t knowingly sell the personal information of those under 16. Learn how you can opt out by going to California: Do Not Sell My Personal Information.
You can usually access, correct, or delete your data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d 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.
When you contact us about one of your rights under this section, we’ll need to verify that you are the right person before we disclose or delete anything. For example, if you are a user, we will need you to contact us from the email address associated with your account. You can also designate an authorized agent to request on your behalf by giving us written authorization. We may still require you to verify your identity with us.
Website Hacked’s Services are worldwide. Different Website Hacked companies are the controller (or co-controllers) 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 following under data. Generally, the “controller” is the Website Hacked company that entered into the contract with you under the Terms of Service for the product or service you use. In addition, Website Hacked, our US-based company, is the controller for some of the processing activities across all of our Services worldwide.
The chart below explains the current controllers for processing your personal information. We use the term “Designated Countries” to refer to Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, and all countries located in Europe (including the UK and ROI).
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 contact us through our web form or via email. These are the fastest ways to get a response to your inquiry, but you can also contact us by telephone at 1-877-273-3049.
Because Website Hacked’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 as per this Privacy Policy as required by applicable law. These measures include entering into European Commission-approved standard contractual arrangements with entities based in countries outside the EEA.
You can ask us for more information about the steps we take to protect your personal information when transferring it from the EU.
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 ads that may be more targeted to your interests. Please note this Privacy Policy only covers the collection of information by Website Hacked and does not cover the collection of information by any third-party advertisers or analytics providers.
If you’d like to use third-party plugins or embeds, WooCommerce Payments (powered by Stripe), WooCommerce extensions that enable services provided by third parties, or other third-party software or services, please keep in mind that interacting with them may mean providing information about yourself (or your site visitors) to those third parties. For example, some third-party services may request or require access to your (yours, your visitors, or customers’) data via a pixel or cookie. Please note that if you use the third-party service or grant access, your data will be handled as per the third party’s privacy policy and practices. We don’t own or control these third parties, and they have their own rules about information collection, use, and sharing, which you should review before using the software or services.
We also process information about visitors to our users’ websites, on behalf of our users and following 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. If you’d like, you can also read more about the data we collect on behalf of our users in our Privacy Notice.
Users control the content posted on their sites, so any disputes regarding content on a user’s site should be made directly to the site owner, through their “contact us” page, at an email address they provide, or by leaving a comment on the site.
Although most changes are likely to be minor, Website Hacked may change its Privacy Policy from time to time. Website Hacked encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the change log below, and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (like adding a statement to our homepage or the WordPress.com Blog, or sending you a notification through email or your dashboard). Your further use of the Services after a change to our Privacy Policy will be subject to the updated policy.
That’s it! Thanks for reading.