Akismet Privacy

Your privacy is important to us

The gist:

  • Akismet is committed to keeping your information private and secure.
  • Akismet's goal is to protect your website from annoying or harmful spam comments.
  • As of January 2019, Akismet protects over 6 million websites and has blocked over 450 billion spam comments.
  • We don't collect more data than we need to in order to protect your site against spam.
  • The data we do collect is securely stored for short periods of time and then automatically deleted from our databases.
  • You can always opt-out of all long-term tracking at any time you wish.

Note: You can view the current number of spam comments Akismet has successfully blocked on our homepage, Akismet.com (yes, our counter pulls from real data!)

Protect your site with Akismet

About Akismet

Akismet is the most powerful anti-spam service for the web. Akismet works by checking all your comments against our constantly-growing global spam database to remove irrelevant, malicious content before it gets published and damages your site's credibility.

Akismet gets increasingly effective over time: the more it learns, the more it protects. Its algorithms are continuously learning from content marked as spam across websites, so it more accurately detects and removes spam from sites in the future.

When Akismet is enabled on your site, only the personal data needed to carry out Akismet's core function of protecting your site against comment spam is collected from commenters on your site. We do not sell the data you send to the Akismet service, and we do not keep it for long. We have short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of our spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases. Anyone can opt-out of all long-term tracking for the very small subset of data we do keep longer by using our contact form. For more information, please visit our Privacy Notice.

Who we are and what we stand for

Akismet is brought to you by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. We're a distributed company with over 800 employees across over 65 countries speaking over 80 different languages. We believe in Open Source and the vast majority of our work is available under the GPL. Our common goal is to democratize publishing so that anyone with a story can tell it, regardless of income, gender, politics, language, or where they live in the world. You can read more about Automattic on our About Us page.

Akismet was created in 2005 by Automattic's CEO, Matt Mullenweg (also the co-founder of WordPress, the open-source CMS software) in order to help protect his mother's personal blog from spam. Since then, it has grown exponentially to detect and protect over 6 million websites (as of January 2019).

For more information