Privacy options (2024)

Tumblr’s a great place to find your people, chat it up, and make lifelong friendships that we’ll later see immortalized in a gif montage. But there are some options for increased privacy, too. Check ’em out:

Blog Visibility

Limiting Your Blog’s Discoverability

You can remove your blog from Tumblr recommendations, search and /tagged pages. You can also discourage external search engines, like Google or Bing, from indexing your blog, but it is up to them to honor that request.

• In the app:
  • Tap your account settings (the little human), and select the blog (if not already selected) in the top, left-hand corner of the screen.
  • Tap the gear icon, select “Visibility”:
    • External searches: Turn on the “Discourage external searching of [your blog name]” switch to discourage external search engines to index your blog.
    • Tumblr recommendations, search and /tagged pages: Turn on the “Exclude [your blog name] from Tumblr search and recommendations” switch to remove your blog from Tumblr searches and exclude your posts and blog from being recommended to others.
• On the web:
  • Visit your blog settings.
  • Scroll down to “Visibility”:
    • External searches: Turn on the “Discourage external searching of [your blog name]” switch to discourage external search engines to index your blog.
    • Tumblr recommendations, search and /tagged pages: Turn on the “Exclude [your blog name] from Tumblr search and recommendations” switch to remove your blog from Tumblr searches and exclude your posts and blog from being recommended to others.

Prevent third-party sharing

This option will prevent your blog’s content, even when reblogged, from being shared with our licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models.

• In the app:
  • Tap your account settings (the little human), and select the blog (if not already selected) in the top, left-hand corner of the screen.
  • Tap the gear icon, select “Visibility,” and turn on the “Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog name]” switch.
• On the web:
  • Visit your blog settings.
  • In the “Visibility” section, turn on the “Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog name]” switch.

If you’ve already chosen to discourage searching of your blog, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.

The content which will not be shared with our licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models, includes:

• Posts and reblogs of posts from blogs who have enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.
• Posts and reblogs of posts from deleted blogs.
• Posts and reblogs of posts from password-protected blogs.
• Posts and reblogs of posts from explicit blogs.
• Posts and reblogs of posts from suspended/deactivated blogs.
• Private posts.
• Drafts.
• Messages.
• Asks and submissions which have not been publicly posted.
• Post+ subscriber-only posts.
• Explicit posts.

Hide your blog from visitors without a Tumblr account

• In your blog settings, turn on “Hide (blog name) from people without an account” to make it so that your blog can only be viewed by other Tumblr users within the dashboard, and only when they’re signed in. Yes you read that right, it means that when this setting is enabled, your blog will not be viewable from its ol’ regular Tumblr url of blogname.tumblr.com and instead redirects to the dashboard (or login page if you’re logged out).

Please note that when your blog is hidden from the web:

• Your blog (yourblogname.tumblr.com) and archive page (yourblogname.tumblr.com/archive) won’t be accessible – logged-in users will be redirected to their dashboards, non-logged-in users will see a prompt to either sign in or create an account.
• Your custom theme won’t be visible at its URL (yourblogname.tumblr.com), even if you’ve enabled the “Custom theme” toggle to “on”.
• Search engines cache content from all over the internet, including Tumblr. Sometimes the cached version of a Tumblr blog or post may remain on a search engine for some time, even after it’s removed from Tumblr or you’ve hidden it from search engines. We don’t control search engine caches, so you’d need to reach out directly to the search engine to have any content removed from its cache.

Password-protect your blog

This is only available for secondary blogs, but:

• To make a blog password-protected so that only you, visitors to which you give the password and Tumblr users you add as members can access it, refer to our Password-protected blogs article.

Hide your activity status

To turn off the green dot that indicates when you’ve been on Tumblr recently:

• In the app:
  • Tap your account settings (the little human), then the gear icon.
  • Tap “General Settings.”
  • Tap to select the “Privacy” section.
  • Turn off “Let others see that you’re active.”
• On the web:
  • Click “Settings” on the left.
  • Click “Privacy” on the right.
  • Turn off “Let others see that you’re active.”

The green dot indicates that you are either online or have been online within the last few hours.

Hide your likes and following

Hiding your likes will also make them private in recommendations to others.

To view your likes or following:

• On the web, click “Likes” or “Following” under the Account menu on the left, or if you’ve enabled the sharing of your likes, visit http://www.tumblr.com/liked/by/yourusername and, if you’ve enabled the sharing if your following, visit http://www.tumblr.com/yourusername/following
• In the apps, tap the account menu, then tap on the “Likes” tab.

To toggle sharing your likes and following on and off:

• On the web, visit your blog settings and look for “Share posts you like” or “Share the Tumblrs you’re following”.
• In the apps, tap the account icon (the little human) while viewing your blog, then tap “Likes” or “Following” and “Change”, or, tap the gear icon and select “Pages”.

Select who can mention your blog

Users can mention blogs in their posts or post replies by typing @username (e.g. @staff). This will send a notification to the blog that’s been mentioned and create a link to the blog in the post.

You control who is allowed to mention you in their post in your blog settings. You have the following options:

• Everyone can mention me
• Only blog’s I’m following can mention me
• Only mutuals can mention me*
• No one can mention me

*Since secondary blogs cannot follow anyone and thus cannot have mutuals, the “mutuals” option refers to mutuals of your primary blog.

In the app:

• Tap your account icon (the little human)
• Tap the gear icon, select “General settings“
• Tap “Mentions”, then tap one of the options to select it.

On the web:

• Visit your blog settings.
• In the “Mentions” section, click the drop-down and click to select one of the options.

Select who can reply to your posts

You decide who replies to your posts.

In the app:

• Tap your account icon (the little human)
• Tap the gear icon, select “General settings“
• Tap “Replies”, then tap one of the options to select it.

On the web:

• Visit your blog settings.
• In the “Replies” section, click the drop-down and click to select one of the options.

For more information, check out our Replies article.

Make specific posts on your blog private

• Choose “post privately” from the post menu when you’re ready to publish. For more on private posts, check out our Private posts article.

Reblog Controls

When creating or editing a post you can choose one who can reblog your post. You can choose between the following two options:

• “Anyone (on Tumblr)” means just that.
• “No one” means that your post cannot be reblogged by anyone except any users you tag in your post (e.g. @staff).

On Mobile Apps

When drafting a post, select the 3 dots (●●●) on the top right.

From here, you can choose one of two options.

• “Anyone (on Tumblr)”
• “No one”

On Web

When drafting a post, select the settings cog in the top right corner of your post editor.

From there, select “Reblog Control” to choose between Anyone (on Tumblr) or No One. (pictured below)

Privacy and explicit blogs

If your blog is flagged as explicit, it will be overlaid with a content filter when viewing directly by you or anyone else and your posts will not show up in search.

You can see if your blog is marked as “explicit” in your visibility settings.

In the app:

• Tap your account settings (the little human), and select the blog (if not already selected) in the top, left-hand corner of the screen.

On the web:

• Check the “Visibility” section of your Blog Settings.

If you think your blog has been erroneously marked as explicit, read about how to appeal here.

EXIF data

We remove all but the following EXIF data from any downloaded image:

• ‘Time’
• ‘Orientation’
• ‘Color Space’
• ‘White Balance’
• ‘White Point’
• ‘Primary Chromaticities’
• ‘Interoperability’
• ‘Artist’
• ‘Copyright’
• ‘Image Description’

Location data is removed from all downloaded images.