Privacy Policy

The short version

Faciey only works on people who switched it on. Discoverability is off when you create an account, and nobody can find you by face until you turn it on yourself.

We store a mathematical representation of your face so that matching is possible. You can turn discovery off, hide individual scans, or delete your face and your account entirely, at any time, from inside the app.

We do not sell your data. We do not share your face data with advertisers.

What we collect

• Account details: your email address, username, display name, bio and avatar.
• Sign-in identifiers, if you use Google or Apple to sign in.
• Face data: the photos you submit during verification, and the numerical embeddings derived from them.
• Scans you run: the images or video frames you submit, the faces detected in them, and the matches returned.
• Activity: profile views, scan counts, connections, messages and notification history.
• What you send in chat: text, photos and voice messages.
• Web searches you run: the scan photo you chose to search and the pages that were found.
• Purchases: which plan you are on and the store’s record of the subscription. Your payment details stay with Apple or Google; we never see them.
• Crash reports: what the app was doing when it stopped, with your device model and app version.
• Device tokens, so we can send you push notifications.
• Which version of the app you use, and whether on iPhone or Android, so we can tell you when an update is needed.

Face data, specifically

When you verify your face, the images are sent to our face-processing service, which converts each one into an embedding: a list of numbers describing the geometry of the face. Matching compares embeddings, not photographs.

An embedding cannot be turned back into a photograph of you. It is still personal data, and in several jurisdictions it is biometric data, so we treat it that way.

Your embedding is only compared against a scan when your discoverability switch is on. Turning it off removes you from matching immediately.

Where it is kept: verification images are held by our cloud storage provider, and embeddings are stored in our own database, hosted in Frankfurt, Germany. Embeddings are generated and compared by our own face-processing service — we do not send your face or your embedding to a third-party face recognition provider, and we never match it against any external face database. Web search, below, is a search for a photo, not for a face, and only runs when somebody asks for it.

Face data is used for one thing only: matching you to scans that people run. It is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared with anyone beyond the processors listed below.

Web search

On Premium, you can ask Faciey to look for a photo from one of your scans on the public web. When you do, the address of that photo is sent to an image-search provider, which returns web pages showing the same photo or ones that look like it.

This searches for the picture, not for a person: no face embedding is used or sent, and nothing is compared against our face database. The photo may show other people as well as the person you are looking for, so only search photos you have the right to share.

The pages found are kept in your search history so you can open them again, and are erased with your account.

Why we are allowed to hold it

For face data we rely on your explicit consent, which you give by completing face verification and by switching discoverability on. You can withdraw that consent at any time by switching it off or deleting your face.

For everything else we rely on performing the service you asked for, and on our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe and working.

Who we share it with

We use a small number of processors to run the service. They act on our instructions and may not use your data for their own purposes.

• Cloud storage providers, for the images you upload.
• Our face-processing service, which generates and compares embeddings.
• Google and Apple, if you choose to sign in with them.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging, to deliver push notifications.
• Our email provider, to send verification and notification emails.
• Image-search providers (SerpApi and Google Cloud Vision), only for the web searches you run.
• Apple, Google and RevenueCat, to process and keep track of subscriptions.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share face data with advertisers or data brokers.

What other people can see

When somebody scans a face and it matches yours, they see what you chose to publish: your display name, username, avatar, bio and the links you added. They see a confidence score for the match.

They do not see your email address, your other scans, or anything you did not add to your profile.

You are told every time your face turns up in somebody else’s scan.

How long we keep it

Face data is kept for as long as your account exists and you keep it there. Delete your face, or your whole account, and it stops being matched immediately; your profile, face data, embeddings, scan history, messages and connections are then permanently erased within 30 days.

You can also delete your face on its own and keep the account, which removes you from matching without losing your links.

Your rights

• Switch discoverability off, which stops all matching against your face.
• Hide yourself from a single scan without changing your overall setting.
• Delete your face data, your content or your entire account.
• Ask for a copy of the data we hold about you.
• Ask us to correct anything that is wrong.
• Object to how we are using your data, or complain to your local data protection authority.

Children

Faciey is not for under-18s. We do not knowingly create accounts for children, and we remove them when we find them. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we will act.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that affects how your face data is used, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect.