Privacy Policy

Last Modified: 2014-01-27

Takes the private nature of your information very seriously. Note that was acquired by, and is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of, Yahoo! Inc. (“Yahoo”) as of June 19, 2013. This policy regarding our privacy practices (the "Privacy Policy") describes how we treat the information we collect when you visit and use tumblr.com (the "Site") and/or other domains, products, advertising products, services, and/or content, including our iOS, Android, and Windows Phone mobile applications (collectively with the Site, the "Services"). 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.

What This Privacy Policy Covers

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”). 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 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 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.

What We Collect and How We Use It

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. We also allow users to look for their friends by email address; you can, however, opt out of email lookup through your Account Settings.

You can keep yourself fairly anonymous on, but remember that your posts, blogs, pages, and username are all visible to the public by default. People that know your email address can also find your blogs. If you’d rather be unlisted, head over to your Account Settings.

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.We send two kinds of email: ones about fun stuff happening on, and ones with important information about your account. You can opt out of the former, but not the latter.

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 to access. To the extent we obtain such information, we may use it to develop new Services or to improve or enhance the Services. When you connect other services to your account, those services might share information about you with us. What gets shown to us is determined by their privacy policies, which are long and boring, but which you should probably read if you have questions or concerns.

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. At its heart, is a public platform. Don’t be afraid to share amazing things, but do understand that it can be hard to completely remove things from the internet once they’ve been reblogged a few times.

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 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. Reblogs, Likes, and Replies are a matter of public record, so if you’re truly ashamed of your desires it’s best to keep them to yourself. But why? Be proud of who you are. You’re beautiful. We’re looking you in the eyes and telling you how beautiful you are.

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.

Financial Information: We will sometimes collect financial information, such as information related to your payment method (valid credit card number, type, expiration date or other financial information). This happens when you decide to purchase a paid Service. We do not, however, store that financial information; such information is stored by our payment processor (the "Payment Processor"), and use and storage of that information is governed by the Payment Processor’s applicable terms of service and privacy policy (the Payment Processor may also have other terms, and you are responsible for locating and familiarizing yourself with those terms, as applicable). 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 (from both and Yahoo) 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, or Yahoo (who we use for mobile analytics and other services), 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 Web Tags: Cookies are text files that may be sent to and saved by your web browser when you access a website; your web browser stores these cookies in a way associated with each website you visit, and you can generally see your cookies through your browser settings, depending on what browser you’re using. A web tag is code or a pixel embedded in a web page, or email, that allows 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, as described above in “Information Related to Use of the Services.” Our cookies do not, by themselves, contain information that personally identifies you, and we don't combine the general information collected through cookies with other such information to tell us who you are. However, we do use cookies to identify that you have logged in, and that your web browser has accessed the Services, and we may associate that information with your Account if you have one. We may also store unique or near-unique identifiers that we associate with your Account in our cookies. This information, in turn, is sometimes used as described above in “Information Related to Use of the Services.” Most web browsers have an option for turning off the cookie feature, which will prevent your browser from accepting new cookies, as well as (depending on the sophistication of your web browser) allowing you to decide on acceptance of each new cookie in a variety of ways. If you disable cookies, you won't be able to log into your Account, and so won’t be able to use the vast majority of our Services; as such, we don't recommend disabling your cookies when using the Services. Some services that we use (including Third Party Services), such as Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics, use web tags and may also place their own cookies on your browser, and individual blogs on our network may contain code that places their own cookies. We also run limited-time studies using web tags, sometimes with third parties, to, for example, measure the effectiveness of our advertising or email. Note that, unless otherwise disclosed, this Privacy Policy covers our use of cookies only and does not cover the use of cookies by third parties.

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.We won’t look at (or be able to look at) your contact list unless you ask us to. Why would you ask us to? Because that’s how you would find out if any of your contacts are on Tumblr. We discard this information immediately afterward.

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.