Acceptable use: what FaceSearch may and may not be used for

Why these rules exist

A face search can find a page about a person from nothing but their face. Used by the person in the photo, that is a privacy tool: it shows you what is out there so you can act on it. Used on a stranger, the same search can strip away the distance that protects people in public, and the law in many countries treats the face as biometric data with special rules. The rules below exist for both reasons. They are not boilerplate; we act on them, and we would rather lose a customer than enable harm.

What FaceSearch may be used for

• Your own face. Finding where your photos appear, checking for reposts and impersonation, auditing your public footprint, and gathering the URLs you need for a removal request. This is the use the product is built around.
• A person who has asked you to search for them. A partner, a family member or a friend who wants help checking their own footprint, with their knowledge and consent.
• Checking who you are dealing with. Confirming that the photos on a dating profile, a marketplace listing, a rental advert or a business contact's profile are not borrowed from someone else, so you can decide whether to continue. The result informs your own decision and a report to the platform; it is not for contacting the person whose photos were taken.
• Journalism and research within the law. Verifying whether a photo has appeared before, checking a source, or studying how images spread, where the work has a public-interest purpose and follows the law and professional codes that apply to it.
• Your own children, as a parent or guardian. Checking where photos of your own child appear so you can request removal. This is the one exception to the rule on minors, and it exists only for parents and guardians acting for their own children.

What FaceSearch may not be used for

• Stalking, harassment or intimidation. Locating, following, contacting or pressuring someone against their wishes, or helping anyone else do so.
• Doxxing and re-identification. Working out the name, address, workplace or accounts of a person who has chosen to be anonymous, or publishing what a search reveals about anyone.
• Searching for anyone under 18. Prohibited for every user except a parent or guardian searching for their own child. This is a policy rule, not a technical one: FaceSearch does not have a filter that detects or blocks the faces of minors, so the responsibility is yours, and breaking the rule ends your account.
• Employment, tenant, credit or insurance decisions. FaceSearch is not a background check and is not a consumer reporting agency. Using it to decide whether to hire, house, lend to or insure someone is banned, and in the United States it would also fall foul of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
• Discrimination or profiling. Sorting or targeting people by race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, health, disability or any other protected characteristic.
• Surveillance of protesters, activists, journalists or officials. Identifying people at demonstrations or in the course of their public work, or compiling lists of them.
• Intimate-image abuse. Finding, collecting or sharing sexual or intimate images of anyone without their consent, including images of yourself that someone else may have shared, except for the purpose of reporting and removing them.
• Circumventing a removal. Searching for a face that has been removed from results, or helping someone else find a person who has opted out.

A result is a lead, not a verdict

Even within the allowed uses, a face search result is a public page where a similar face appears. It is not a name, not an identification and not proof of anything. Look-alikes happen, especially with low-quality photos, and a page can show someone who merely resembles the person you searched for. Before you act on a match, confirm it with clues that are not the face: the name on the page, the location, the date, the context. The results guide explains how, and why a missing result means nothing.

How the rules are enforced

• Account closure. Accounts used for a prohibited purpose are closed and the plan is cancelled. We do not give refunds for the remainder of a plan closed for misuse.
• Reports. If you believe someone has used FaceSearch to harm you or someone else, email contact@facesearch.cc with what you know. We read every report, reply, and act on the account involved where we can identify it.
• Law enforcement. We respond to lawful requests from law enforcement in the jurisdictions where we operate. We do not sell data and do not provide search data to anyone outside a lawful process.
• Removal is always available. Anyone, at any time, can have their face hidden from results for free; see remove my photos. A removal also applies to every other user's searches.

The law, in brief

Searching for your own face is lawful in every country where FaceSearch operates. Searching for someone else's face is lawful in most places for ordinary purposes such as checking the person you are talking to, but the detail differs: the EU and UK treat biometric data as a special category under the GDPR, Illinois and some other US states have their own biometric privacy laws, and India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act sets its own consent rules. The legal guide goes through each. Our rules are stricter than the law in several places on purpose; where the law is stricter than our rules, the law wins.

How these rules relate to our other policies

This page is the plain-language version of the conduct rules in our Terms of Service, which is the binding document. How we handle the photo you upload is on privacy by design and in the Privacy Policy. If you have a question that none of these answer, write to contact@facesearch.cc and a person will reply.