An update for users in Brazil and the United Kingdom
To continue our commitment to user safety and to comply with local laws, we will start using age groups to determine access to certain experiences.
People in Brazil or in the UK, who are 18 or older, will soon need to verify their age to change content label settings and view mature-labeled content. Until then, the settings will be locked to hide.
As a reminder, verification is handled by our age-assurance partner, k-ID. Tumblr won't have access to the information you submit, just the final age-verification result. Documents are deleted after confirmation, and facial scan data never leaves your device.
Questions? Contact Tumblr support or learn more about these changes here.
If you do this, you WILL lose customers/users/ad revenue. I know if this goes through I'm immediately deleting the tumblr app off of all my devices.
k-ID is highly unreliable, and is putting more people at risk of data breaches than the alternative of minors encountering 'mature content' that you heavily police (over-liberally imo, but is policed and removed per Tumblr's terms of service). It is clearly obvious that a service involved in a data breach controversy with another popular social platform (Discord, October 2025)
The platform says hackers targeted a firm that helped to verify the ages of its users.
(From here on out I am mainly focusing on UK laws and guidelines, as that is what I am more familiar with.)
The UK's Online Safety Act 'applies to services even if the companies providing them are outside the UK should they have links to the UK. This includes.... (if) it is capable of being accessed by UK users and there is a material risk of significant harm to such users.' (see below).
Per Tumblr's User Guidelines, "Visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia) are not allowed on Tumblr." ( https://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/user-guidelines ) According to its own guidelines, there ought not to be 'a material risk of significant harm to (UK) users' for Tumblr to deem their site applicable to the act.
(It should also be worth noting that a petition against the act on the grounds of freedom of information and speech by over half a million people; more fuel to the argument against the age verification.)
We want the Government to repeal the Online Safety act.
Overall, this change would drive many users off of your platform, while ruining the trust between you and even more. Do not implement it.
