This is a plain English summary of all of the components within Ghost which may affect your privacy in some way. Please keep in mind that if you use third party Themes or Apps with Ghost, there may be additional things not listed here.
Each of the items listed in this document can be disabled via the config.js file. Please see the the configuration guide in the support documentation for details.
Some official services for Ghost are enabled by default. These services connect to Ghost.org and are managed by the Ghost Foundation: the Non-Profit organisation which runs the Ghost project.
When a new session is started, Ghost pings a Ghost.org endpoint to check if the current version of Ghost is the latest version of Ghost. If an update is available, a notification appears inside Ghost to let you know. Ghost.org collects basic anonymised usage statistics from update check requests.
This service can be disabled at any time. All of the information and code related to this service is available in the update-check.js file.
Ghost uses a number of third party services for specific functionality within Ghost.
Ghost makes use of the Open Sans Google Font, which is loaded into the Ghost admin area to provide a typographically stimulating experience.
To automatically populate your profile picture, Ghost pings Gravatar to see if your email address is associated with a profile there. If it is, we pull in your profile picture. If not: nothing happens.
When you publish a new post, Ghost sends out an RPC ping to let third party services know that new content is available on your blog. This enables search engines and other services to discover and index content on your blog more quickly. At present Ghost sends an RPC ping to the following services when you publish a new post:
RPC pings only happen when Ghost is running in the production environment.
The default theme which comes with Ghost contains three sharing buttons to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. No resources are loaded from any services, however the buttons do allow visitors to your blog to share your content publicly on these respective networks.