We’re up to 170 million blogs. Whatever, nbd. But the bigger we get, the more government requests for account data we receive. And since there may be a day when it’s your information they want, it’s important you know what they’re asking for.
Starting today, we’ll be publishing a biannual Transparency Report detailing the number of requests we get from different sources, why we receive those requests, and how we respond to them.
If the report is TL;DR, here’s the upshot: Tumblr received a total of 462 requests for user data in 2013, and responded with account data (e.g., email and IP address) 76% of the time. A small subset of those responses also included content of blog posts (e.g., text, audio, images, or video).
The remaining requests (24%) were illegal, vague, or inaccurate—so we refused to provide any data at all.
Striking the right balance between privacy and legal responsibilities is no small task, but we hope this report demonstrates our ongoing commitment to this community.
