Tumblr, Inc. ("Tumblr," "we," "us," or "our") takes the private nature of your information very seriously. This policy regarding our privacy practices (the "Privacy Policy") describes how we treat the information we collect or receive when you visit and use tumblr.com (the "Site") and/or Tumblr’s other domains, products, advertising products, services, and/or content, including our iOS and Android mobile applications (collectively with the Site, the "Services"). Tumblr is a subsidiary of Automattic, a technology company that empowers people to build beautiful websites, tell their stories, and find and grow their audience. The way we handle your information hasn’t changed, so this Privacy Policy still governs when you are on Tumblr, using a Tumblr app or interacting with our products, services or technologies. We may share non-personal information with our family companies for purposes such as product improvements, research and analysis, and to help them provide you with more relevant experiences. When you use the Services, you also consent to the collection, transfer, manipulation, storage, disclosure and other uses of your information as described in this Privacy Policy; please read it carefully.
This Privacy Policy covers our treatment of information gathered when you are using or accessing the Services. This Privacy Policy also covers our treatment of any information about you that our partners share with us or that we share with our partners.
This Privacy Policy does not apply to the practices of third parties that we do not own, control, or manage, including but not limited to any third party websites, services, applications, or businesses (“Third Party Services”). This includes third parties you provide with information about yourself as part of enabling or using a Tumblr feature, for example, information you provide to Stripe when interacting with the Tipping Feature within Tumblr. While we try to work only with those Third Party Services that share our respect for your privacy, we don't take responsibility for the content or privacy policies of those Third Party Services. We encourage you to carefully review the privacy policies of all Third Party Services you access.
Also: This Privacy Policy doesn’t govern what our users do on their Tumblr blogs and we aren't responsible for the information collection and use practices of our individual blogs and bloggers. One of the great features of Tumblr's products is customizability, and bloggers have a lot of flexibility in how their blogs behave. When you visit a blog in our network, that blog may collect more information than we do, and may provide information to third parties that we have no relationship with, including to advertisers.
Account Information: When you create an account on the Services (an "Account"), we’ll ask you for information such as your username, password, age, and email address (“Account Information”). We may use Account Information, alone or together with other information, to enhance and improve the Services, such as by personalization. We use your age to verify that you can lawfully use the Services. We use your email address to verify your Account and to communicate with you, as described in more detail below.
Email Communications with Us: As part of the Services, you may occasionally receive email and other communications from us. Administrative communications relating to your Account (e.g., for purposes of Account recovery or password reset) are considered part of the Services and your Account, which you may not be able to opt-out from receiving. We also may send you other kinds of emails, which you can opt-out of either from your Account Settings page or by using the “Opt-Out” link in the emails themselves. Note that we will never email you to ask for your password or other Account Information; if you receive such an email, please forward it to us.
Information about Your Accounts on Third Party Services: You can link your Account to certain Third Party Services. In order to do so, you may provide us with your username or other user ID for a Third Party Service, and you may then be required to log into that Service. After you complete this login process, we will receive a token that allows us to access your account on that service so that we can, for example, post your content to that service when you ask us to. We do not receive or store your passwords for your Third Party Service accounts.
Information Obtained from Third Party Services: In some cases, we partner with Third Party Services that may provide information about you. Such information could include, for example, your gender, if you have disclosed that information to that third party and made it available for Tumblr to access. To the extent we obtain such information, we may use it to develop new Services or to improve or enhance the Services.
User Content: By default, all sharing through the Services is public, and when you provide us with content it is published so that anyone can view it. Although we do provide tools, like password-protected blogs, Asks, and Fan Mail, that let you publish content privately, you should assume that anything you publish is publicly accessible unless you have explicitly selected otherwise. Also, please keep in mind that anything you share privately with another user, particularly through an Ask, Fan Mail, or submitted post, may be posted publicly by that user. Content published and shared publicly is accessible to everyone, including search engines, and you may lose any privacy rights you might have regarding that content. In addition, information shared publicly may be copied and shared throughout the Internet, including through actions or features native to the Services, such as reblogging.
Native Actions: The Services allow you to perform native actions that are integral to our products, such as liking a post, reblogging a post, replying to a post, and following a blog. Liking, reblogging, and replying are public actions – anyone can expand the “notes” view on a post, for example, to see who liked, reblogged, or replied to a post. We use information about native actions to improve the Services, develop new Services, and, particularly, to personalize your Tumblr experience. Personalization using this information may include presenting you with new posts relevant to what you’ve liked, providing you with better search results, and showing you advertising more relevant to your interests.
Information About User Content: In some cases, we may collect information about content you provide to the Services. For example, when it's included as part of your images, we may collect information describing your camera, camera settings, or EXIF information. This information allows us to improve the Services and provide additional features and functionality.
Contact and Financial Information: There are various ways in which you may provide us financial information and contact information. For example, if you buy something from us (like Blaze, Premium Themes, or a domain name), tip a blog, or earn revenue through your site, you provide additional personal and payment information like your name, credit card information, and contact information. We also keep a record of the purchases you’ve made. You may also provide us with financial details to set up a payments integration (like Tipping), like the email address for your Stripe account.
We do not, however, store that financial information; such information is stored by our payment processor (the "Payment Processor"). Please note that if you use the Payment Processor’s services, your data will be handled in accordance with the Payment Processor’s privacy policy and practices. They have their own rules about information collection, use, storage, and sharing, which you should review before using the Payment Processor’s services. We do receive certain information from our Payment Processor: (1) a unique token that we connect with your Account to enable you to make further purchases using the information stored by our Payment Processor and (2) in certain cases, the last four digits of the credit card number associated with that token, so that we can prevent fraudulent transactions and identity theft.
Information Related to Use of the Services: We collect information about how people use the Services, including those with an Account. This type of information may be collected in our log files each time you interact with (i.e., make a request to) the Services. We use internal tools and third party applications and services (like Google Analytics or comScore) to collect and analyze this information. Some of this information may also be associated with the Internet Protocol Address (“IP Address”) used to access the Services; some may be connected with your Account; and some may only be collected and used in aggregate form (as a statistical measure that wouldn’t identify you or your Account). We also collect your IP Address when you make a post, particularly when you submit an anonymous “Ask.” We may use this information about how you and others interact with the Services for a number of things generally related to enhancing, improving, protecting, and developing new Services, including but not limited to: providing users with personalized content; providing users with targeted advertising; improving our search results; identifying trending or popular content; fighting spam, malware, identity theft and generally keeping our users and community safe; and for legal and safety reasons as set forth in “Information Disclosed for Our Protection and the Protection of Others.”
Information Related to Your Web Browser: We automatically receive and record information from your web browser when you interact with the Services, such as your browser type and version, what sort of device you are using, your operating system and version, your language preference, the website or service that referred you to the Services, the date and time of each request you make to the Services, your screen display information, and information from any cookies we have placed on your web browser (as described below). We also sometimes detect whether you are using certain web browser extensions and store that information in a manner associated with your Account. We use web browser-related information to enhance and improve the Services.
Location Information: In some cases we collect and store information about where you are located, such as by converting your IP Address into a rough geolocation. We may also ask you to provide information about your location, for example to use your geolocation information from your mobile device to geotag a post. We may use location information to improve and personalize the Services for you, for example by showing you relevant local content.
Information Related to Your Mobile Device: We may collect and store information related to your mobile device. In some cases, we may receive, generate, or assign your mobile device a unique identifier for the purposes described above in “Information Related to Use of the Services.” We may also ask you to provide your phone number to enable new products and improve the Services, such as by enabling multi-factor authentication for Account login. We will always ask you whether it’s OK for us to collect and store your phone number.
Information Collected Using Cookies and Other Technologies: A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Pixel tags (also called web beacons) are small blocks of code placed on websites that allow Tumblr or a third party to see that you have looked at that page. We use cookies and web tags to enable our servers to recognize your web browser and tell us how and when you use the Services. Some services that we use (including Third Party Services), such as Google Analytics, Nielsen, and comScore, may use their own web tags or place their own cookies on your browser. If you are a Tumblr user in the EU, UK, or in some US states you can customize your cookie preferences from your privacy settings.
Information About Your Contacts: Certain features of the Services allow you to provide us with your contact lists, so that we can connect you with people in our Services that are also on those contact lists. For example, you can temporarily connect your email contact information to your Account, so that we can provide you with a list of your email contacts that use the Services. As another example, you can send us your mobile phone contact information through our mobile applications, which then allows us to provide you with a list of those contacts that use the Services so that you can “follow” their blogs. We will give you a choice as to whether or not you provide us such information, and we will disclose fully, within the appropriate feature, how we use that information.
Derived Information: As described above in “Native Actions” and “Information Related to Use of the Services,” we analyze your actions on the Services in order to derive or infer characteristics that may be descriptive of your Account (for example, what kinds of blogs you follow or what kinds of posts you view, like, or reblog). We use this information for all of the purposes set forth in “Information Related to Use of the Services,” above.
In order to provide you with all of this Tumblr content for free, Tumblr selectively runs advertisements. We, and our parent company, Automattic, work with online advertising companies to provide you with advertising that is as relevant and useful as possible. To make our ads more relevant and useful, we make educated guesses about your interests based on your activity on our sites and services. The ads we show you often reflect these interests and educated guesses.
To learn more about how we select the ads you see, you can check out Tumblr’s Advertising and affiliate policies.
Managing your choices for personalized advertising experiences: In some geographic locations, Tumblr users have the legal right to opt-out of having ads personalized to them. Note that if you opt-out you will continue to see advertisements on Tumblr, though they will be less relevant and useful to you.
If you are a Tumblr user in the EU, UK, or in some US states you can customize your advertising preferences from within your privacy settings.
When using the mobile app version of Tumblr on Apple iOS devices you can also opt out of personalized advertising by selecting "Limit Ad Tracking" in the iOS settings. For more information about these iOS options:
When using the mobile app version of Tumblr on Android devices you can opt-out of personalized advertising by selecting "Opt out of Interest Based Ads” in Google settings. For more information about these Android options:
More information about options for hiding, reporting, and controlling the ads you see on Tumblr can be found in our Tumblr Ads & You support doc.
We never share information we receive from you unless: (a) we have your permission to share that information; (b) we have given you prior notice that the information will be shared, and with whom (such as in this Privacy Policy); or (c) that information is aggregate information or other information that does not identify you.
Information Shared with and Received from our Corporate Parents: We are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Automattic, and a member of the Automattic family of companies. Because we are a wholly-owned subsidiary, Automattic and the rest of our family of companies may receive any information we do, and may share information they have with us. Our family of companies may use the information they receive from us to help us provide, understand, and improve the Services (including by providing us analytics) and in connection with their products and services (including by providing you with a more personalized experience). For details about how Automattic treats the information it collects, please review this Privacy Policy.
Information Shared with the Public Through the Services: As noted in “User Content” and “Native Actions,” above, by default, content published through the Services and many actions you take on the Services are shared with the public. Because this kind of information can be seen by anyone and may be indexed by search engines, you should be careful about what you choose to disclose publicly and make sure it’s information you want to share with everyone.
Information Shared Between the Services: We may, if possible, aggregate information about your use of multiple Services and use that consolidated information to enhance and improve the Services, and to develop new Services.
Information You Share with Third Party Services: You may access Third Party Services through the Services, for example by clicking on externally-pointing links. You may also choose to share information that you provide to us, like blog posts, with those Third Party Services (for example, by sharing posts to Twitter or Facebook). This Privacy Policy only governs information we collect and you are responsible for reading and understanding those Third Party Services' privacy policies.
Information Shared with Our Agents in Order to Operate and Improve the Services: In some cases, we share information we store (such as IP addresses) with third parties, such as service providers, consultants, and other agents ("Agents"), for the purposes of operating, enhancing, and improving the Services, and developing new products and services. For example, we may share information with service providers that help us fight spam, payment providers that process your credit and debit card information, customer chat and email support services that help us communicate with you (hey there!), registrars and registries that allow us to provide domain registration services, analytics providers that help us understand and improve our services, and third party partners that pitch in on our marketing efforts (like identifying a specific marketing target group or improving our marketing campaigns, and by placing ads to market our services), along with third-party consultants who may have access to information in the process of improving our processes and technology. Agents with whom we share such information for these reasons are generally bound by confidentiality obligations and, unless we tell you differently, our agents do not have any right to use information we share with them beyond the scope and duration of what is necessary to assist us.
Information Disclosed Pursuant to Business Transfers: In some cases, we may choose to buy or sell business assets. In these transactions, user information is typically one of the transferred business assets. Moreover, if we, or substantially all of our assets, were acquired, or if we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of us or our assets may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy.
Information Disclosed to Comply With Legal and Regulatory Requirements: We believe in freedom of expression, and, to the extent reasonable, we try to protect our community from baseless legal demands. That said, we may disclose information about you in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request. For more information on how we respond to requests for information about Tumblr users, please see our Law Enforcement Guidelines. Additionally, if you have a domain registered with us, we may share your information to comply with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) regulations, rules, or policies. For example, your information relating to your domain registration may be available in the WHOIS database, or we may be required to share your information with ICANN-approved Dispute Resolution Service Providers. Please see our Domain Registrations and Privacy support document for more details.
Information Disclosed for Our Protection and the Protection of Others: We reserve the right to access, preserve, and disclose any information as we reasonably believe is necessary, in our sole discretion, to (i) satisfy any law, regulation, or governmental request, (ii) enforce this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations hereof, (iii) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security, trust and safety, or technical issues (including exchanging information with other companies and organizations for the purposes of improving security and preventing fraud, spam, and malware), (iv) respond to user support requests, or (v) protect the rights, property, health or safety of us, our users, any third parties or the public in general, including but not limited to situations involving possible violence, suicide, or self-harm.
Information We Share with Your Consent or at Your Request: If you ask us to release information that we have about your Account, we will do so if reasonable and not unduly burdensome.
Information Shared with Other Third Parties: We may share or disclose non-private information, Aggregate Information, or other non-personally identifying information with people and entities that we do business with.
Your Account Information is protected by a password for your privacy and security. We may enable additional security features in the future, like multi-factor authentication. You need to prevent unauthorized access to your Account and information by creating a unique, secure, and protected password and limiting access to your computer and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your Account on the Services.
We seek to protect your information (including your Account Information) to ensure that it is kept private; however, we can't guarantee the security of any information. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors may compromise the security of user information at any time.
Tumblr will retain your information only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy, for as long as your Tumblr account is active or as needed to provide you with the Services. If you no longer want Tumblr to use your information to provide you with the Services, you may close your account and Tumblr will delete the information it holds about you unless we need to retain and use your information to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, to enforce our agreements or as otherwise permitted by law.
If you are a registered user, you can access most information associated with your Account by logging into the Services and checking your Account Settings page. Registered and unregistered users can access and delete cookies through their web browser settings.
If you want to delete your Account, you can do so from your Account Settings. Deleting your Account may not fully remove the content you have published from our systems, as caching of, backups of, copies of, or references to your Account Information may not be immediately removed. In addition, given the nature of sharing on the Services, some of the public activity on your Account prior to deletion (such as reblogs of your blog posts) may remain stored on our servers and accessible to the public.
You’ll do great things on Tumblr, surely, but if it ever comes time to say goodbye, then you’re free to delete your account at any time and for any reason. The deletion will be effective immediately, for the most part, but it might take a little while to scrub everything from our archives and backups.
What won’t get scrubbed are Reblogs of your posts. Those will remain on whatever blog reblogged them. Like we said before, it can be really, really hard to delete something once it goes out onto the internet, so be sure you’re only publishing stuff that you’re certain you want to publish.
If you’re a resident of certain US states including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia, you have a number of rights and choices about your personal information. To learn more, see the Supplemental Privacy Notice below.
We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time, using the process for modifications set forth in our Terms of Service. Use of information we collect is subject to the Privacy Policy in effect at the time such information is collected.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding privacy using the Services, send us a detailed message.
You will find a link to prior versions of our Privacy Policy below. We have stored these versions on GitHub, which will also allow you to compare different versions and see what terms have changed:
https://github.com/tumblr/policy/commits/master/privacy-policy.txt
Laws in some US states require us to provide residents with additional information about the categories of personal information we collect and share, where we get that personal information, and how and why we use it.
In the last 12 months, we collected the following categories of personal information (as those terms are defined by applicable law)
You can find more information about what we collect, the business and commercial purposes we use it for, and the sources of that information in the “What We Collect and How We Use It” section above.
We share this information with the categories of third parties described above in “With Whom Your Information Is Shared."We retain this information for the length of time described in our Security and Retention of Your Information section.
We may also use the categories of personal information for compliance with applicable laws and regulations. We may aggregate the information we collect or de-identify it in order to limit or prevent the identification of any particular user or device.
In some US states, you have additional rights subject to any exemptions provided by your state’s respective law. You can find detailed metrics about Tumblr's compliance with these rights in our Privacy Report here.
Certain information may be exempt from these rights under applicable law. For example, we need certain types of information so that we can provide you with the Services. If you ask us to delete them, you may no longer be able to access or use the Services.
Before we can satisfy your request, you’ll need to give us enough information so that we can be certain of your identity. To do that, you’ll need to log in to your account or give us certain information about you and/or your use of the Services. You can also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf. To do so, you have to give us written authorization for the agent to act on your behalf. You’ll still need to verify your identity directly with us.
Right to Opt-Out: Tumblr selectively runs advertisements so we can provide you with Tumblr content for free. To help select which ads to show you, we may share some of your information with advertising partners, or allow our advertising partners to “collect” certain information. The personal information we share includes online identifiers and internet or other network or device activity (such as cookie information, other device identifiers, and IP address), and geolocation data (approximate location information from your IP address). In some US states, this data sharing may be considered a “sale.” To learn more about how we select the ads you see, check out Tumblr’s Ads & You. We do not sell (or share) information that identifies you personally, like your name or contact information, in our ads program. Also, we do not knowingly "sell" your personal information if you are under 16.
Learn how you can opt out by going to Your Advertising Choices. If you are a user who has told us you are under 16, you’ll see in your settings that we’ve already opted you out.
In addition to the data sharing related to our ads program, sometimes Tumblr shares your information with our third-party service providers to provide our services to you. To the extent that we share your information with certain advertising, marketing, or analytics vendors, this can be considered a "sale" or “share” in certain U.S. States, which you may have the right to opt out of. This opt-out is controlled through the same opt-out as the personalized ads program opt-out, found in your settings. We also respect the GPC browser signal and will treat it as a valid means of communicating your desire to opt out.
We do not collect or process your sensitive (and potentially sensitive) personal information except where it is strictly necessary to provide you with our service, where the processing is not for the purpose of inferring characteristics about you, or for other purposes that do not require an option to limit under California law.
In some circumstances we may deny your request to exercise one of these rights. For example, if we cannot verify that you are the account owner we may deny your request to access the personal information associated with your account. As another example, if we are legally required to maintain a copy of your personal information we may deny your request to delete your personal information.
In the event that we deny your request, we will communicate this fact to you in writing. You may appeal our decision by responding in writing to our denial email and stating that you would like to appeal.
If your appeal is denied, in some US states you may refer the denied appeal to the state attorney general if you believe the denial is in conflict with your legal rights.
You can usually access, correct, or delete your personal data using your account settings and tools that we offer, but if you aren’t able to or you’d like to contact us about one of the other rights, scroll up to “Where to Direct Questions or Concerns” to, well, find out where to direct your questions or concerns.