Pinterest

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Pinterest

Basic information
Founded	2009
Legal Structure	Public
Industry	Social media service
Official website	https://pinterest.com/

Pinterest is a photo-hosting service and company started by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in December 2009. It was initially intended to function as a digital version of traditional catalogs, but it changed to being an image host shortly after.

Consumer-impact summary

• User freedom: Absolute; content is rarely taken down unless mass-reported.
• User privacy: Questionable; private boards can be accessed by staff.
• Business model: Profits from affiliate links and advertisements. In May 2025, Pinterest's revenue was up 17%.
• Market control: Dominant; overrides original sources in image searches. Monthly active users in May 2025 was 570 million at its highest.

Incidents

This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Pinterest category.

Training of AI based on user-submitted content (2025)

In March of 2025, Pinterest updated their terms of service (TOS) to include a new clause which states:

Improve the products and services of our family of companies and offer new features. For example, using information to train, develop and improve our technology such as our machine learning models, regardless of when Pins were posted. This includes, for example, Pinterest’s body type technology, which is trained on images in Pins posted to our Services.

The vagueness of this new clause rightfully brings concern, as Pinterest has been well-known to host stolen content. This suggests that user-generated works may have been collected and used for AI training purposes without explicit consent. Such data could be used to train Pinterest's own AI models or sold as training data to other companies developing AI technologies.

Exploitation of pinned images (circa 2012)

As content from creators are nonconsensually "pinned" to the platform, since 2012, if not earlier, Pinterest claims rights inside its TOS to:

By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, *modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.

In simpler terms, this means that any content uploaded to Pinterest can be freely used by the platform and its users in any manner. Given the platform's history of hosting content without explicit consent, this raises concerns that creators' works may be overridden in search feeds and copyrights overridden for unauthorized purposes by other publishers.

Excessive advertising

For years, dozens of users have reported excessive advertising on Pinterest , going as far back as 2015. Many online posts describe how the excessive ads ruin the user experience and have led to the abandonment of the platform altogether. One user states, "Due to the bombarding of ads on Pinterest, I went from scrolling through pins for hours to scrolling through pins for less than 5 seconds and then closing the apps".

An article on Android Authority describes how a platform for hobbies and crafts turned into a hub for discovering products (often on Amazon), which first began around 2013 and was then ramped up two years later as the platform shifted to a social e-commerce site. The platform even introduced a feature called Shoppable Pins, which uses hovering to show items in a picture while linking to external retail sites. These Shoppable Pins are treated as content rather than advertisements, which the article then goes on to say, "This is dishonest and misleading, and makes for an even worse experience than constantly being bombarded by pins from popular brands any time you search for something."

See also

• DeviantArt