Oh, How Pinteresting!, Announcing Secret Boards for the Holidays!

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Announcing Secret Boards for the Holidays!

The holidays are a time for being with family, sharing great meals, and, of course, surprising your favorite people with a special gift. That’s why we thought the holidays were a perfect time to test one of our most frequently-requested features: secret boards! Starting today, we’ll be gradually rolling out a test that enables anyone to create three secret boards.

We hope that secret boards will make Pinterest even more useful. You can use secret boards to keep track of holiday gifts, plan a special event, or work on a project you aren’t yet ready to share with the rest of the world. You can keep your secret boards to yourself or invite family and friends to pin with you.

To create a secret board from the web, visit your profile and scroll down to the bottom. Then, click Create a Secret Board. You can also click Add+ on the top right-hand corner of Pinterest to select Create Board and turn the Secret button to On.

If you’re on your mobile device, first download the most recent version of Pinterest for iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android tablet.  

Then, go to your profile, tap on the Boards tab, and scroll down to the bottom until you see a button that says Create a Secret Board.

When you add a pin to a secret board, it won’t show up anywhere else on Pinterest—the only place you can see it is on your secret board. Right now, you can’t make existing boards secret because others people may have already repinned from your board. See this support article to learn more about secret boards.

Finally, secret boards were not on the horizon when we last revised our Privacy Policy, so we’ve updated that document. While we were adding secret boards to the policy, we also took the opportunity to simplify the overall language of the policy and provide more examples. We think the result is a much clearer and more understandable policy for the non-lawyers who use Pinterest. In addition to this blog post, we’ll be sending an email notification about the privacy policy update.

Thanks for all your feedback, and for trying secret boards with us! We hope they’ll be a big part of your holiday planning and we can’t wait to hear how you use them. Tell us your plans in the comments!

—Evrhet Milam, Software Engineer, Currently obsessed with pinning to shoes.