For several days, I have been attempting to let a large blogging website know that I have become aware of exploitation through their site’s back end — namely, that it is possible, and apparently pretty easy for someone with the right amount of knowledge and fortitude to access information that one would at least think they should not be able to access. I have made reports to the blog site in question (okay, it’s Tumblr) about this, going into enough detail about the process as I’ve heard about it to hope that Tumblr would take the security of their site seriously enough to at least get back to me thanking me for letting them know about this and doing something, anything to fix it. As I’m sure a lot of you can probably already tell by the fact that this post is even being written, this is as far from the case as can possibly be. For multiple reasons, I no longer have an account on Tumblr. I did at one point, and I had for a long time, but I decided that for many reasons it was no longer worth the risk or even the time taken each morning to reblog one or two things pertinent to passing interests that I did not and do not talk about with any of the people that I know offline.
Anyway, Tumblr has “responded” to maybe a third of the reports that I have sent them total about more than one situation, sending me copied and pasted responses claiming that they will look into what I have reported to them… but not actually bothering to look into, or do anything about, any of it. At this point we are on day four of this being a known problem, although I’m beginning to wonder how long it’s been a problem for them on the back end of their website’s security (none of this is or will ever be my specialty, though). I think that if Tumblr cares so little about the integrity, safety, and security of their site to begin with that it should no longer be something that I concern myself over or with, and it’s not going to be something that I use in the future or let my children use. I think we would be better off using LiveJournal even though it is currently owned by Russia, because at least it is secure enough for me to feel safe writing about our daily lives in entries made to varying filters pre-programmed into the account that I’ve had there on it for years.
