In reply to Rick Smith.

Sorry Rick, but you're confusing things. There is no 3rd party who controls your content. When using WordPress, the content is saved within your database on your own server...

This simply is about the fact that the theme had included widgets to display content like team members (or else) and when you enter the content into the widget and then switch to another theme that doesn't have this widget, you obviously can't use the widget anymore.

But still the content is saved in your database and you either could code a custom widget for displaying the content or edit your database to make the content available. Of course that isn't optimal and that's what this discussion is about, but there is no 3rd party who controls your content. No need for conspiracy theories. :-)