Find my photos: face data and retention

How the optional "Find my photos" search in Rokstr Studio galleries uses face data, how long it is kept, and how to have yours removed.

1. What Find my photos is

Some photographers who deliver galleries through Rokstr Studio let guests find the photos they appear in, by tapping their face in a grid of the people in the gallery, or by taking a selfie. It is off unless the photographer turns it on for a particular gallery, and it is only offered for kinds of shoot where guests are mostly adults (weddings, portraits, headshots, corporate events, concerts, parties and similar).

It is never offered in school, sports or team galleries, family or newborn galleries, or any gallery linked to a tournament. Photographers must have a Pro plan and must accept a notice before turning it on, and they are responsible for telling their clients that the gallery uses it.

Early access, and not in Illinois for now. Find my photos is in early access: only photographers we have switched on can offer it. It is not offered by studios based in Illinois, or for shoots that took place in Illinois, while we make sure it meets Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act. Photographers tell us where their studio is based and, each time they turn it on, whether the shoot took place in Illinois. We'll update this page when that changes.

2. What face data is created

• Faces in the gallery's photos. When a photographer turns the search on, each photo is analysed by Amazon Rekognition, which creates a face template (a numerical description of facial geometry) for each face it finds. These templates are biometric identifiers. They are stored in a collection that belongs to that one gallery and is never shared with any other gallery or with our player-matching system.
• Faces grouped by person, and a thumbnail of each. Faces that match each other are grouped as one person. For each person in two or more photos, we crop a small thumbnail of their face from one of the gallery's photos. Anyone who has opened the gallery sees these thumbnails and can tap one to see that person's photos. Guests can remove themselves (section 5), and the photographer, or anyone pictured, can ask us to hide a person. We do not attach names to these groups.
• Faces that appear to be under 18 are not kept, so they are never grouped and never appear as a thumbnail. Rekognition estimates an age range for every face. A face whose estimate is centred under 18, or that has no estimate, is deleted the moment it is found. The estimate can be wrong, so this is a safety measure, not a guarantee.
• Your selfie. When you search, your selfie is sent to Amazon Rekognition, compared against that gallery's faces, and discarded. It is never saved: not to storage, not to our database. A selfie that appears to show someone under 18 is refused without being compared.
• Your results. We keep the list of photos the search found, attached to your visit to that gallery, so "My photos" is still there when you reload the page. That list is not biometric data.

We do not attach names to faces, we do not sell, lease or trade face data, and we do not use it for anything other than showing guests their own photos in that gallery.

3. Consent

Tapping a face in the grid uses no data from you. Before searching with a selfie, you must tick a box confirming that you are 18 or older and that you agree to your selfie being compared with the faces in the gallery as described here. We record when you agreed. Without that agreement, no search runs. Searching is never required to view or buy photos.

4. How long face data is kept

A gallery's face data, including the person groups and face thumbnails, is permanently deleted, all at once, when any of these happens:

• the photographer turns Find my photos off;
• the gallery expires, is archived or is deleted;
• the gallery is moved to a kind of shoot that doesn't allow the search;
• the photographer's plan no longer includes it, or their account is deleted;
• three years have passed since the photographer turned it on, even in a gallery set never to expire.

We check for these every few minutes, and deletion normally completes within an hour. When a single photo is removed from a gallery or taken down, the faces from that photo are deleted the same way.

5. Removing your face

In a gallery with Find my photos on, choose Remove my face from this gallery. You don't need to have searched, or even to have entered the gallery. You take a selfie, we delete every face in that gallery that matches it (so you also disappear from the face grid), and we keep one face template from that selfie in the same gallery's collection, only so that photos added later are not indexed with your face. That template is deleted with the rest of the gallery's face data under section 4.

You can also email support@rokstrsports.com with the gallery link, and we will remove your face for you. To have a photo removed altogether, use the photo removal link in the gallery.

6. Who processes it

Face templates are created, stored and compared by Amazon Web Services (Amazon Rekognition) in the United States, acting as our service provider. We do not disclose face data to anyone else unless required by law. The photographer whose gallery it is does not receive face data; Studio shows them only how many photos have been indexed.

7. Security

Face data is protected with the same safeguards as the rest of our sensitive data: encryption in transit and at rest, access limited to the systems that need it, and a log of each indexing run, search and removal that records counts and times but no images or face data.

8. Contact

Richmond County Media, LLC
550 Manor Rd St1, Staten Island, NY 10310
Email: support@rokstrsports.com

See also our Privacy Policy.