PRIVACY POLICY

Trace is a reverse face search tool. The thing you give us is a photograph of a face, which under the GDPR and the KVKK is a special category of personal data. This page says exactly what happens to it, in plain language, with no clause that means the opposite of what it appears to.

Who we are

Trace is operated by Trace Labs ("we"). You can reach us through the support form. Trace Labs is the data controller for everything described below.

What we collect

The photograph you upload. Cropped in your browser to a square around the face before it is sent, so what leaves your device is the face you framed, not the whole picture.
The results of your search. Match scores, the platform and handle of each match, the link, and a small preview thumbnail of each matching image.
Your account. An account ID and a hash of your recovery key. We do not have your recovery key itself — only a hash, which cannot be turned back into the key.
Your credit balance and the ledger of purchases and searches behind it.
A hashed form of your IP address, used to rate-limit free scans and account creation. We do not store raw IP addresses.
Your Telegram user ID, but only if you pay with Telegram Stars — it is how a payment is matched to your account and how support can sign you back in later.
A payment record if you pay with cryptocurrency: the amount, the coin and the payment identifier our payment processor gives us. We never see a wallet address, and the processor hosts the payment page — we do not handle the transfer ourselves.

We do not ask for your name, your email address, your phone number or a password, because Trace has no sign-up form. There is nothing to give us.

Where your photograph goes

Trace runs the search on its own engine, on our own server. We are not reselling another company's face search.

But the photograph does still leave our server, and we would rather say so plainly than let "our own engine" be read as "it never goes anywhere". To find where a face appears, the engine queries public image search engines on your behalf. Those engines fetch the image themselves rather than accepting an upload, so for the duration of one search — up to about ten minutes — the cropped square is served from a signed, unguessable web address. It is not listed anywhere, it is not indexed by us, and the address stops working when the window closes. It is a deliberate trade-off, and it is the only way this kind of search works at all.

What we cannot promise is what happens to that copy on their side. Those engines keep their own logs and caches and we have no control over them; their own policies apply. If you want to know exactly which engines a search queries, ask us through the support form and we will tell you.

All of this is set out on the scan screen itself, above the button that starts the search, and you accept it when you create your account. There used to be a dialog before every single upload; it was removed because a box that appears every time is a box nobody reads, and because the text now sits where you are actually looking.

We share your data with nobody else. We do not sell it, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not build an identity profile of you or of anyone whose face you search.

The face index we keep

This is the part most face search services do not spell out, so here it is plainly. When a search confirms a match with high confidence, we write that face into our own index: the numerical measurement of the face, a small crop of it, and the public web address it was found on. The next search for the same person can then be answered from that index instead of paying a search engine again — which is why searches get faster and cheaper over time.

What that means, said directly: we hold face measurements of people who never came here and never asked to be in it. Every service of this kind does; most do not tell you. The index is built only from images that were already published on the open web, it holds no name we were given, no contact details and no profile, and only faces we could attribute with confidence are written at all.

If your face is in it, you can take it out. The removal page deletes every entry that matches your face and adds it to a permanent do-not-index list, so a later search cannot put it back. It needs one photograph and no account, and the photograph you send is not stored — we read the measurement and discard the file. It does not remove anything from the websites that published your photos; only they can do that.

How long we keep it

Uploaded photographs and result previews: 30 days, then deleted automatically. They are kept that long only so you can reopen a scan you already paid for.
Deleting a scan deletes its images immediately, and deleting your account deletes all of them at once — including the copy the search engine held while it was working. Neither is a "mark as hidden": the files are removed.
Accounts with no credits, no scans and no payments are deleted after 30 days of inactivity.
Payment records are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, because we have no lawful way to delete them sooner. Deleting your account cuts the record loose from you: the link to the account and the address it was paid from are erased, and what is left is an amount, a date and the reference a refund needs.

Where it is stored

On our own server in Germany, operated by Hetzner Online GmbH, inside the EU. Uploaded images are stored outside the web root and are served only through a signed link tied to your account — knowing a URL is not enough to open someone else's image.

Your legal basis, and your rights

We process the photograph on the basis of the explicit consent you give when you create your account, on a screen that states what is being accepted and links to this policy. You can withdraw it at any time by deleting the scan or your account; that does not undo searches already run, but it removes what we hold. If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your photograph, we ask again rather than relying on the old acceptance.

Under the GDPR and the KVKK you have the right to access, correct, delete and export your data, and to object to processing. Trace is built so that most of this is a button rather than an email: the panel lets you see everything on your account, delete individual scans, and wipe the account entirely. For anything the panel cannot do, contact us through the support form.

Cookies

Trace sets two cookies and neither is for tracking: a session cookie, and a long-lived device cookie that keeps you signed in without a password. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics on the panel, and no cross-site tracking. That is why this site has no cookie banner — there is nothing to ask you to opt into.

Searching other people

If you upload a photograph of someone else, you are processing their personal data and you are responsible for having a lawful basis to do so. Trace exists to verify who you are dealing with and to let you find your own images; it must not be used to identify, locate, monitor or harass anyone. See the Terms of Use.

If you believe someone has searched your face through Trace and you want to exercise your rights, the fastest route is the removal page: it takes your face out of our index and keeps it out, without an account and without an email to us. What it cannot tell you is who searched you, and neither can we — a search is stored against the account that ran it, not against the face it was looking for, so we have no way to go from a photograph to a list of searches. For anything else, write to us through the support form.

Children

Trace is not for anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly hold data from a minor.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your photograph, we will ask for consent again rather than quietly updating the date at the top.