Stop WordPress from Collecting My Site Data

I’m looking for a plugin to see about deleting cookies, but I found this one: Show Me The Cookies which will give all the cookies on a site. It is interesting that they also concur that WordPress uses under-the-hood cookies by default.

Still the issue is not that I want to collect information—I don’t. And I don’t want WordPress collecting site data either. It is not hypocritical at all if I have no control over it. I SHOULD have control over both!

Show Me The Cookies displays all current cookies your site is using. Once activated, you can find this list under Appearance – Cookies.

Furthermore you can display this list to your visitors by placing the shortcode [cookies] into any post or page.

WordPress uses several cookies under the hood by default. If you’d like to filter these out, you can use the shortcode [cookies-nowp]. If you like, you can replace the default separator between the cookie name and its value by adding your own string between the opening and closing shortcode tags, for example [cookies] ==> [\cookies].

This plugin is based on code by David Artiss, who kindly made it available on GitHub. I’ve wrapped it up into this standalone plugin.

To find out more about what cookies are and what can be done with them, please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

If you add the following to your theme’s functions.php file, WordPress will not send server data when checking for updates:

add_filter('core_version_check_query_args', function($data) {
	return [
		'version'            => $data['version'],
		'locale'             => $data['locale'],
		'local_package'      => $data['local_package'],
		'initial_db_version' => $data['initial_db_version'],
	];
});

For what it’s worth, I agree with you. WordPress is covertly sending information about your site for which it has no need, such the number of users. And there is no doubt this information (including site/server IP addresses) is in the hands of Automattic (a private company) in addition to the GPL WordPress project.

While I don’t think it will, the above code might break plugins such as WP Downgrade that attempt to manage the update process. If you use such a plugin, make sure to do some testing!

Thanks, Dion. How hard would it be to make a plugin with a simple checkbox to enable or disable this filter?