Sh… it’s a secret… no one knows about it… and of course can’t comment, recommend or even see it whatsoever. It’s your own personal furtive scrapbook online, where images can be Pinned but not candidly Repinned. In fact, it’s so cryptic that you can only create up to three of those. Sh…

The image-based social network Pinterest has decided it want to enable users to be less social and more confidential about some of their Pins if they wishes to. To do so, the service is introducing “secret boards” (currently still termed as a test) as a way to Pin images that will remain private and hidden from the public eye.

Pins that were added into a secret board won’t appear at any other place on Pinterest rather than on the secret board itself. Other users and search engines will be blocked from accessing secret boards and even if they’ll try by directly typing its URL they’ll see a 404 error message (missing page).

To create a secret board on the website you can click on the Add+ button at the top of the page and after choosing “Create a Board,” set the “Secret” option to ON. The other possibility is to scroll down the profile page and click on the “Create a Secret Board” button, where the Secret option already marked as ON.

On the mobile iOS and Android apps, simply tap on “Create a Secret Board” at the bottom of your own profile. On the secret board’s settings page, the creator can add contributors to the board (“Who can pin?”) which will be granted full access to the board’s contents. However, contributors are not allowed to invite others or make the board publicly visible.

It’s important to note that after a secret board’s creator alter it to public, it can’t be switched back to secret since people might have already been actively engaged with it. For the same reason please heed that existing public boards can’t be toggled to secret.

The whole concept of secret boards and private pins supposed to bestow users a much greater sense of personal experience when using Pinterest. It indicates on Pinterest’s ambitions to grow beyond “just” a popular social service into a much more familiar intimate online destination for users, in which they come to not just for sharing photos with the world but also creates private clandestine collections.