Tumblr’s violating your privacy by default again
solluxisms
Hey guys, a quick note. Tumblr just added a ‘feature’ that shows if you’re online or not. The only place I see it is in the messenger, though it might be elsewhere. It’s showing a friend as online even though they just have a tumblr tab open that they haven’t looked at in hours. It also shows how long ago they were active. I don’t know how it interacts with the app.
I have a few problems with this:
- I personally don’t like the feeling of being stalked
- People could actually stalk you
- Person A could get mad at Person B because it said Person B was online but they weren’t (and thus didn’t respond) - or just wasn’t up to talking
- Person X could message Person Y and get anxious when person Y doesn’t respond, since it says they’re online
I found the place to turn it off in account settings. There’s a section called “Availability” where you can toggle off the functionality.
Safe browsing, folks.
kimbureh
@staff why do u want us off the site so badly
Its been gone lately. In fact I only saw it for a few hours I think, some never got it. And it only showed “within the past hour” “within the past two hours” etc, and had an easy setting to turn it off (and I believe only if you were mutuals), I think that’s a pretty fair balance between usefulness and a degree of privacy. And if I had to guess, the “on by default” was only due to it being a small scale, short-lived test.
