Privacy options

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:

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” under the account menu at the top of the dashboard (the little human).
  • Click “Privacy” on the right side of your screen.
  • Turn off “Let others see that you're active.”

Prevent people from finding you via your email address

• In the app:
  • Tap your account settings (the little human), then the gear icon.
  • Tap “General Settings.”
  • Select “Privacy” and turn off “Let others find you by email.”

• On the web:
  • Click “Settings” under the account menu at the top of the dashboard (the little human).
  • Turn off “Let people find your blogs through this address” at the top of the page.
    

Hide your blog from search results

You can remove your blog from all search engine results (including our own) like so:

• 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 “Hide (blog name) from search results” switch.

• On the web:
  • Click “Settings” under the account menu at the top of the dashboard (the little human).
  • Click the name of the blog on the right-hand side of the page.
  • In the “Visibility” section, turn on the “Hide (blog name) from search results” switch.
    

Hide your blog from the web

• In that same location (blog settings -- Visibility), turn on “Hide (blog name)” 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). 
  
• Note: 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.
  

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.
  

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.

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:

• Click “Settings” under the account menu at the top of the dashboard (the little human).
• Click the name of the blog on the right-hand side of the page.

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

EXIF data

The following EXIF data is retained for use in themes:

• ‘Time’
• ‘FocalLength’
• ‘FocalLength35mmEquiv’
• ‘Aperture’
• ‘ExposureTime’
• ‘ISO’
• ‘CameraMake’
• ‘CameraModel’
• ‘Lens’
• ‘SensorWidthMM’

You can read more about how this data is used over in our theme documentation.