Wordpress the software is open source and isn't known to do anything shady. Wordpress.com the hosted CMS product uses tracking pixels.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Privacy
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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so what do i use? wordpress.org?
Yes
If you are trying to get the Wordpress software and install it on a server you own or web hosting account you pay for, yes.
If you're trying to do something else, like sign up for blog hosting from a privacy-respecting service provider without having to administer software yourself, then no. If you want recommendations for services like that, you should probably make a separate post asking for that, with as much detail about what you want to do and whether you're willing to pay for it as possible.
Edit: I see you did make such a post. If you're "not tech savvy" as your post says, I don't recommend administering Wordpress yourself. While it's something nearly anyone can learn if sufficiently motivated, it's much more effort for someone without a technical background.
Are we talking about the software for hosting websites, or about their website? Big difference.
This is probably not an easy question to answer, since, as another comment pointed out, WordPress is both an open source software option to selfhost your website, and also a non-free managed hosting option that you can use to host your website.
For the former, you fully control what plugins are installed, and if you don't want social media tracking pixels on your site then don't install one.
For the latter, you also mostly control what gets installed on your hosted website, but not entirely. It's running on their servers so in theory they could be injecting tracking. I believe they do have some plugins like Jetpack that are always installed on managed websites, with some anti-features included that can be turned on (but don't have to be).
I always recommend going the self hosted route with WordPress, if you are even the tiniest bit technical minded. It's very easy to deploy on something like DigitalOcean or your own home server, and then you don't need to worry about tracking from WordPress.com.
For blogs, yes. As long as you don't use plugins to do non-blog things. Wordpress plugins have hefty security issues.