How we handle the photo you upload

What happens to your photo, step by step

1. 01You choose a photo. In the browser or the app, the photo is downscaled on your device before it is sent, so we receive a smaller image than the original.
2. 02Metadata is stripped. Camera make, location, time and every other embedded field are removed, and the image is re-encoded. What reaches the search is pixels, nothing else.
3. 03The face is compared. The face in the photo is compared with faces on publicly accessible web pages. Only public pages are in the index; nothing behind a login, no private albums.
4. 04You see the results. The matched images and their source pages are shown to you and to no one else. There are no public result pages and no shareable links to other people's searches.
5. 05You decide what to keep. Signed in, the scan is saved in your history until you delete it. As a guest, the result is tied to your browser session and not to any account.

What we never do with your photo

• We never sell it, and we never share it with advertisers or data brokers.
• We never use it to build a face database. Your upload is a query, not an entry. It does not make you findable by anyone else.
• We never use it to train a model. Uploads do not improve our matching and are not fed to any machine-learning pipeline.
• We never show your results to anyone else. Results belong to the account or session that ran the search.
• We never add names. FaceSearch returns pages where a similar face appears; it does not identify people and holds no records of who anyone is.

What we store and for how long

Who else touches your data

A small number of providers run parts of the service for us, and each sees only what its job requires. Our hosting provider runs the servers the search runs on. Our payment processor handles card details, which never touch our servers; we see that a plan was bought, not the card. Our sign-in provider verifies your email or your Google or Apple sign-in. If you accept analytics cookies, an analytics provider sees anonymous usage of the website, never your photos or results, and you can change that choice at any time from the cookie settings link in the footer. None of these providers may use your data for their own purposes.

Control that is always yours

• Delete a scan. Open it from your history and choose delete. It is gone from your account.
• Delete your account. From Profile, or by following the steps on delete your account. Everything attached to the account goes with it. Cancel any subscription first; deleting the account does not stop billing through the App Store or Google Play.
• Export your data. From your account, you can download the data we hold about you.
• Remove your face from results. Anyone, with or without an account, can ask us to hide their face from every user's searches, for free; see remove my photos.
• Ask a question. Privacy and data requests go to contact@facesearch.cc, and a person replies.

Security

Traffic between your device and FaceSearch is encrypted. Sessions use secure, HTTP-only cookies rather than tokens stored in the browser. Server-side keys stay on the server and are never shipped to your browser. If you find a security problem, our security contact and disclosure policy are published in the standard security.txt file on this site; please report there rather than in public, and we will respond.

Why this matters for a face search engine

A face search engine is only safe to use if the people who use it to check their own footprint are not themselves turned into entries in a database. That is the line we hold: your upload is a question, not a record. It is also why we say plainly what the product cannot do. FaceSearch only sees public pages, it does not identify anyone, and a result is a lead rather than a verdict. The acceptable use page sets out the rules for searching anyone other than yourself. For the legal text behind this page, read the Privacy Policy.