At first glance, Tumblr seems to have a pretty straightforward privacy policy, stating that the site 'takes the private nature of your personal information very seriously'. The policy openly states that non-identifying information of visitors to the site is collected for statistics purposes. It then goes on to say that Tumblr also collects identifying-information, which is available only to Tumblr employees, contractors and affiliates who require the information in order to keep the site running, and will not be supplied to third parties... EXCEPT of course, if Tumblr decides to sell it as an asset: 'In addition, in some cases we may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, user information is typically one of the business assets that is transferred'. So basically they say 'we will not give your details to other companies, oh yes, unless we decide we want to make some money off it. Then we will'. Tumblr does however give users the option to not supply some personal information, however this decision will affect the functionality of some features on the site.
This is quite a good policy though: 'Upon your request, we will provide you with a summary of the information we collect about you. You will have the opportunity to correct, update, modify or delete this information by sending an e-mail to support@tumblr.com. Please note that some information may remain in our records after deletion of your account'. Having the opportunity to view the information that has been collected about yourself, and being able to modify or delete that information if you wish, is quite advantageous, in theory. In practice, I imagine the process may not be as simple as the policy makes it out to be.
Tumblr's content policy does not allow: Identity theft, spam, hate content and defamation, sexually explicit content, exploitation or illegal use. Tumblr reserves the right to suspend an account if it is in violation of it's content policy, blocking public access to the content.
Tumblr acknowledges that user content remains the property of the user, but upon uploading to the site, the user grants Tumbr a license to use the content pretty much how they wish, and also can sub-licence the content to others. Tumblr will also attempt to remove all your content from their site if you decide to delete your account.
Overall, Tumblr seems pretty transparent and fair in their policies, except for that one sneaky line about selling your information as 'assets'.
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