Developer guidelines

Our mission

  • At Pinterest, our mission is to help people discover and do what they love. As a developer, you can play an important role in making that happen. These are guidelines for what we do and don’t allow when building Pinterest-related apps and services. At a high level, please make sure you:

  • Don't build something that recreates Pinterest’s core functionality, look or feel, or that misrepresents your affiliation with us.

    Review our brand guidelines for general rules about using our brand.

    Get approval from us before mentioning Pinterest in press.

    Don’t deceive or confuse people on Pinterest.

    Follow our rate limits and don’t spam Pinterest.

    Be sure to follow our policies on contests and paid content.

    Be open about the functions and features of your service.

    In general, only use API data to help users succeed on Pinterest.

    Respect our open endpoints and only use supported APIs to access Pinterest.

  • You’re responsible for following all laws, regulations and industry codes, as well as our terms and policies, including our community guidelines and privacy policy. Keep in mind that you can't use our developer tools if your service is directed at children under 13.

     

    Finally, we may suspend your access to the API or end our relationship for any reason.

Permitted use cases

  • We currently provide the following tools for developers:

    Our developer API should only be used for direct-to-consumer integrations that help people discover and do what they love. And to avoid confusion with our Marketing Partners program, we don’t allow marketing platforms to use our developer API. This includes (but isn’t limited to) services that are meant to help marketers, advertisers or digital publishers (e.g. bloggers) report on, manage, distribute or optimize the digital marketing for paid or organic media.

    In short, you shouldn’t use our developer API if your integration is intended to be authenticated by marketers, advertisers, businesses, or individuals with financial motivations for marketing purposes. You also can’t use our APIs to save, print or edit photos. If you are planning to use our API for one of these purposes or are unsure if this is relevant to you, let us know before building out your integration.

     

Accessing APIs

  • When you're accessing information from our APIs:

  • Don’t store or change images (unless you have permission from the copyright owner) and don’t let people print images from Pinterest.

    Don’t store any data other than Pins.

    Don’t share data from someone’s account without their permission. Even if you have permission, don't publicly share data that identifies a Pinterest user if that info isn't publicly available on Pinterest.

    Don’t use or share any data (including derivative data) with advertising and monetization services or data brokers.

    Don’t sell data to anyone and don’t use it to target people off Pinterest.

    Don’t join our API data with personally-identifiable information (unless it’s to identify someone who’s given you access to their Pinterest account) or with device-level information (like a cookie or device identifier).

    Don’t access, modify, store, share or use content on secret boards (unless we’ve given you permission).

    Immediately stop using and delete all API data (including derivative data) about a person if they or we revoke your access or ask you to remove it.

    Keep your data in sync with ours. For example, if someone deletes a Pin from their board, you must delete it too.

    Let people know how you’ll use their data by providing a privacy policy that’s easy to find.

    Provide people with clear, conspicuous ways to share content on Pinterest. For example, if you use Pin data for personalization or recommendations, make it easy for people to save content back to Pinterest.

Publishing content or reporting

  • When you're reporting, publishing content or taking actions on a user’s behalf:

  • Link Pins back to their source or Pin URLs. Also, make sure it’s clear that a Pin’s image and data come from Pinterest.

    Don’t cover or obscure content from Pinterest.

    Don’t create new content from Pins that can be distributed on your app or service.

    Don't display reporting from Pinterest next to or near reporting from other similar services.

    Let people know and agree to anything you do on their behalf, like adding content to Pinterest, changing their Pinterest profile, or following and unfollowing profiles or boards.

    Respect sites that don't allow saving to Pinterest.

Providing an advertising service

  • If you access our Ads API or use information from any Pinterest API to provide an advertising service, follow the guidelines above and also do the following:

  • Follow our advertising guidelines.

    Respect people's accounts.

    Respect people's accounts.

    To be respectful of people's accounts:

    • Only access someone's account with their permission.
    • Only use information from their account to provide services to them.
    • Don't combine their account information with information from other people's accounts or other services.
    • Don't use information from the Pinterest API except to serve and evaluate the performance of that person's ads on Pinterest.

    Don't share information from our API with a third party, including another advertising service (it's okay to share with the person whose account it's from).

    Don't reverse engineer or replicate features from our advertising service, including targeting options.

    If you report last-click attribution metrics, next to them with equal prominence you must show multi-touch metrics that divide attribution equally among each attributed service.

    Don't disclose your Pinterest sales figures in public statements or marketing materials.

    Follow our rules for invoicing and reporting.

    Follow our rules for invoicing and reporting.

    Clearly and separately show the fees you charge for Pinterest advertising and the fees we charge (both the absolute amount and by our billing metrics, like CPM or CPC), and don't combine your fees with ours.

  • If you provide audience onboarding as part of your advertising service, you must comply with these policies:

  • If you use Pinterest technology that stores and accesses cookies or other information on an end user's device, clearly disclose and obtain end user consent for that activity where required by law.

    Don't give Pinterest information you collect from a child-directed website or app, or from anyone you know is under 13.

    Don't give Pinterest any information about sensitive categories.

    Don't give Pinterest any information about sensitive categories.

    Sensitive categories include:

    • Health or medical condition
    • Racial or ethnic origin
    • Negative financial status or condition
    • Religious or philosophical affiliation or beliefs
    • Sexual behavior or orientation
    • Alleged or actual commission of a crime
    • Trade union membership

    Follow our rules for providing us with data if advertisers will use that data for online behavioral advertising.

    Follow our rules for providing us with data if advertisers will use that data for online behavioral advertising.

    Respect and follow these rules:

    • Give clear and prominent notice to everyone you collect data from letting them know that their information will be shared with third parties for targeted advertising.
    • Give instructions on how to opt out of the use of their information for targeting advertising.
    • Don't send us information about people who've opted out.
    • Regularly update data to remove people who've opted out.
    • Get any consents required by law.