Photo Processing Policy

At PhotoConnect, we are committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring that your photos are processed securely and responsibly. This policy outlines how we handle photo processing, including the technologies we use and the measures we take to safeguard your data.

1. Photo Processing Technologies

We utilize advanced technologies such as facial recognition to enhance your experience on PhotoConnect. These technologies allow us to provide features like face search.

2. Data Security Measures

We implement robust security measures to protect your photos during processing. This includes encryption of data in transit, secure access controls, and regular security checks to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities.

3. User Control and Consent

We respect your control over your photos. You can choose to enable or disable certain photo processing features, such as facial recognition, through your account settings. We will always seek your consent before processing your photos for any new features.

4. How face search works on PhotoConnect

When you upload photos to PhotoConnect and grant a consent to enable processing of biometric data, we extract facial features to create a unique template for each face. This template is securely stored and used to power our face search functionality. We also store a position of the face on the image.When you perform a face search, we compare the facial features in your query photo against the templates in our database to find matches. We do not share your facial data with third parties, and you can delete your photos and associated facial templates at any time through your account settings.

5. Are all faces public?

No, all faces are private by default. We always require explicit consent to perform a search against your faces. Currently a few criteria have to be met for a face to be searchable by others:

• 1. A photo that face is on has to be public.
• 2. The face must be assigned to a person.
• 3. The person has to be marked as deceased by the user.
• 4. The person must be marked as public by the user.

Those four conditions are nessacary to ensure no faces of living people can be publicly searched by others. We take privacy and security seriously, and we are committed to providing you with control over your photos and how they are processed on our platform.

If faces are on private photos and are not assigned to a person, or a person is not marked as deceased, those faces will be only searchable by the owner of those photos. This allows users to benefit from face search features for their own photos without making their faces searchable by others, providing a balance between functionality and privacy.

If you have any questions, or concerns about this policy, please contact us at [email protected].