How identifind uses face matching

This page explains, in plain language, how identifind uses face matching to find photos of you from running-club events. It is an explainer for people who want to understand the system before signing up or before enabling face matching on their account. It is not, and should not be read as, an agreement or a consent — the actual consent is captured separately, as an unchecked-by-default checkbox during sign-up, adjacent to the verbatim consent language we are required to show you.

If you have already signed up and you want to enable or disable face matching, you can do that on your settings page.

For the full legal description of how we handle your biometric information, see our Privacy Policy. The Privacy Policy controls if anything on this page is in tension with it.

What the Service does

Photographers and club organizers upload event photos to identifind. If you choose to enable face matching, the Service compares your face to the faces in those photos and surfaces the matches on your personal photo page. The point is simple: instead of scrolling through a gallery of 1,000 race photos looking for yourself, you see only the photos that depict you.

That is the entire purpose. We do not use face matching for anything else.

What a face vector is

When you upload your reference selfie, our face-matching processor generates a mathematical representation of your facial geometry. That representation is called a "face vector" or a "face template." It is a list of numbers describing distinctive geometric relationships in your face.

A face vector is not a photo of your face. It is not an image you could reconstruct your face from with widely available technology. It is more like a numerical fingerprint of your face's geometry — useful for the specific task of comparing two faces and asking "is this the same person?" and not particularly useful for anything else.

We keep your reference selfie alongside the face vector so that if the face-matching technology improves and the vector needs to be regenerated, we can do so without asking you for a new selfie. Both the selfie and the vector are treated as biometric information.

How the matching works

When a photographer uploads a photo to a club gallery, the face-matching processor looks at the faces in the photo and compares each one to the face vectors of the members of that club who have enabled face matching. If a face in the photo matches your face vector above a confidence threshold, the photo is added to your personal photo page and you receive a notification.

A few things to know about how this works in practice:

• Face matching is probabilistic. No system is perfect. Sometimes we will find photos of you that you would not have spotted on your own. Sometimes we will miss photos that obviously depict you, because of angle, lighting, or face coverings. Occasionally we will surface a photo that does not actually depict you, because someone else's face is geometrically similar enough. You can remove any photo from your personal photo page that you do not want there.
• Only your clubs' photos are compared against your face. If you are a member of three clubs, your face is compared against photos uploaded to those three clubs' galleries. Your face is not compared against photos uploaded to clubs you do not belong to.
• Other people's faces are not compared against yours. If a photo from your club depicts another runner, your matching process does not look at their face. Their matching process (if they have enabled face matching) looks at their face.

Who actually does the matching

The face-matching computation runs on Amazon Web Services' Amazon Rekognition service. AWS Rekognition is a managed image-analysis API that AWS sells to many customers; identifind is one of them. When we send a face vector to AWS Rekognition or ask it to compare faces, AWS is acting as our subprocessor under AWS's standard Data Processing Addendum.

AWS does not use your face vector for AWS's own purposes. AWS does not look at it. AWS Rekognition is a software service that performs the comparison we ask it to perform and returns the answer to us.

Your face vector is stored in an AWS Rekognition collection that is scoped to identifind users, in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) region. It is not in a public database. It is not pooled with face vectors from any other AWS customer. It is not shared with anyone.

What we do not do

We do not, and we commit not to:

• Sell, lease, trade, or otherwise transfer your face vector or reference selfie to anyone.
• Use your face vector or reference selfie for advertising or marketing of any kind.
• Use your face vector for surveillance, identity verification outside the Service, profiling, automated decision-making about you, or training of general-purpose machine-learning models.
• Provide your face vector or reference selfie to law-enforcement agencies, except in response to a legally valid subpoena, court order, or other compulsory legal process — and where we are legally permitted to do so, we will tell you before complying so you have an opportunity to respond.
• Compare your face against photos uploaded to clubs you do not belong to.
• Use your face vector for any purpose other than finding your photos in your clubs' galleries.

How long we keep your face vector

We keep your face vector and reference selfie for as long as you are an active member of at least one club on the Service, and for up to three (3) years after your last interaction with the Service, after which they are automatically purged unless you have re-enabled face matching in the meantime.

You can delete them sooner — see the next section.

How to turn it off

You can disable face matching at any time from your settings page. Doing that will:

1. Delete your face vector from AWS Rekognition.
2. Delete your stored reference selfie.
3. Stop comparing your face against new photos uploaded to your clubs.

Photos that have already been matched to you and added to your personal photo page will stay there unless you separately delete them.

Turning face matching off is permanent for the face vector we had. If you later decide to turn it back on, you will be asked to upload a new selfie and to give consent again. We cannot recover the old vector after deletion.

Disabling face matching is at least as easy as enabling it. One click in your settings.

How we keep it safe

Your face vector and reference selfie are encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is limited to the system components that perform face matching on your behalf, with audit logging on access to biometric resources. We treat biometric information with at least the same standard of care we apply to other confidential and sensitive information.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a security incident that affects your biometric information, we will notify you and, where required, the appropriate regulators.

What the law calls this

If you are a resident of one of the US states or other jurisdictions that have specific laws about biometric information, here is how the things on this page map to the legal terms those laws use:

• Illinois (BIPA). Your face vector is a "biometric identifier"; your face vector and reference selfie together are "biometric information." Our specific purpose, retention period, third-party processor (AWS Rekognition), and your right to revoke are described in our Privacy Policy. The discrete written release required by BIPA is the affirmative-action checkbox you tap at sign-up, adjacent to the verbatim consent paragraph; we keep your record of that consent and it is available to you on request.
• California (CCPA/CPRA). Your face vector is "biometric information" and is treated as "sensitive personal information." You have rights to know, delete, correct, limit use of sensitive personal information, and others — see the Privacy Policy for how to exercise them.
• EU and UK (GDPR / UK GDPR). Your face vector is "biometric data" used for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, which makes it special-category personal data under Article 9. We process it on the basis of your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a). You can withdraw that consent at any time, with the effect described above.
• Texas, Washington, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and the other US states with biometric or comprehensive consumer-privacy laws. Your face vector and selfie are treated as biometric or sensitive data under each of those laws, and we process them only with your opt-in consent.

Questions

For privacy questions about face matching or biometric information, email privacy@identifind.ai. For the full legal description, see our Privacy Policy. For the rest of the Service's terms, see our Terms of Service.

If you are ready to sign up, go to our sign-up page. You will be asked at the appropriate step to read the consent text and to affirmatively check a box if you want to enable face matching. The choice is yours; you can also use the Service without face matching enabled, and you can change your mind later either way.