The brand on the screen rarely runs the check: your document and face route to a verification company, and when the images are deleted the result stays. Fraud exceptions store the rest, and your face can train the next model.
The verifier holds the master key to your identity. Track it.
Documents flagged as fraudulent, and data kept to "improve" the check, can be held with no end date.
The service exists to take your ID and face: document, selfie, and a liveness video.
Industry profile reviewed 23 August 2026. Also machine-readable via the free API.
This is the leak that cannot be undone. A verifier holds the passport scan and the face that proves it is yours, and archives of exactly that pairing have leaked before. You cannot reissue your face.
The brand on the screen rarely runs the check
Your ID and face commonly pass through a chain you never chose: the platform picks a verifier, the verifier passes work to vendors of its own, and each link keeps a copy under its own rules. People at outsourcing firms on another continent can review your document, and requests about your data are sent back to the platform that ordered the check.
The images go, the result stays
Deletion typically removes images and keeps what was made from them: results and check records are commonly kept for good, and face maps and document codes feed shared fraud databases matched against strangers' future checks. How long it stays is often set by the verifier's business customer, and some timing runs from that relationship, not from you.
Your face can train the next model
Across the sector, improve means train: policies keep verification images to sharpen the recognition systems sold to the next customer, and a regulator has already fined a verifier for keeping ID documents to train its software. The consent screen often does legal work too, sometimes carrying an arbitration clause and a promise not to sue.
Worked out from the industry, not from any one company. What you actually handed over is yours to record.
Built only from what this kind of service actually collects. A dimension that the data does not support is not listed.
A face template that matches you for life.
Which sites checked you builds a picture of where you go online.
Two kinds of hold. LAW SETS IT: a statute makes them keep it. THEY SET IT: a ground the company grants itself.
To prove they checked your age or identity and to block known fraud, sometimes held by a separate verification company.
To flag suspected fraud, often on a shared industry database you cannot reach through the company.
Money-laundering rules require ID and transaction records after an account closes.
Tax and company law makes them keep billing and payment records.
They can keep records to defend a live or possible legal claim.
The hunger is built in: the checks themselves are the training data and the fraud network behind the product, and vendors advertise models refined on millions of checks. Around that sits a documented breach record: archives of ID images and selfies have leaked repeatedly, from verifiers and from their support vendors, and email-based age checks read advertising-broker files to guess your age.
Sold as a trust product; the data itself trains the vendor's systems.
Your face and document train the vendor's age and identity models, sometimes via a pre-ticked box.
There is nothing to anonymise: a biometric template is you, and a leaked face or ID cannot be reissued like a password.
Fifteen demographic attributes re-identify 99.98% of Americans in a released dataset (Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications, 2019); date of birth, postcode, and sex alone did it for most people in the first study of the problem (Sweeney, 2000).
A face, voice, or fingerprint template identifies a person directly; there is nothing left to anonymise, and it cannot be reissued like a password.
THE STUDIES Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models (Nature Communications 10, 3069, 2019)·Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3, 2000)
Clauses that recur across this industry, and what each one actually permits.
“to provide and improve our services”
The catch-all purpose. Analytics, profiling, personalisation, and increasingly AI training can all ride under it. When they want to do something new with your data, this sentence usually already covers it.
THE MOVE An objection draws the line: use your data to run the service, not to improve, target, or train on it.
“we do not sell your personal information”
Often technically true, and still misleading. It usually means no cash changes hands. Data can still flow to ad networks, analytics firms, and partners: on their definition, sharing is not selling.
THE MOVE Flip the do-not-sell switch where one exists. The written objection on top of it goes on your record.
“service providers, partners, and affiliates”
How data leaves the building with no name attached. Recipients are listed by what they do, never who they are. You cannot send a request to a company you cannot name, which is the point.
THE MOVE An access request can ask for the recipients by name, not just the categories. UK and EU law put that choice with you. The reply, or the silence, goes on your record.
“aggregated or de-identified information”
Stripping the name does not strip the pattern, and the pattern often still points at you. Policies grant themselves free, indefinite use of this data because in their telling it is no longer about you.
THE MOVE If a deletion comes back as 'anonymised', keep the reply. It is their claim, not a fact you can check.
“retained as long as necessary, or as required by law”
They can keep it for: legal duties, tax rules, fraud prevention, possible lawsuits, their own business reasons. None of them carries a firm end date. Deletion becomes a negotiation, not an event.
THE MOVE Which reasons apply to you, and how long each runs, is a request of its own. Their reply goes on your record.
“you grant us a licence to use your content”
A contract term, not a data setting, so a privacy request cannot undo it. The careful version ends with your account. The broad version can be passed on, never expires, and survives deletion.
THE MOVE Whether the licence ends with the account is written in their terms, not yours. Closing the account goes on your record.
“we process this information on behalf of the business that requested the check”
The deflection clause. The verifier holds your face and documents but answers only to its business customer, and requests sent to the verifier are commonly routed back to the platform, or refused on arrival.
THE MOVE Aim the request at the platform that ordered the check. A reply that names the verifier and what it received turns the chain into a list.
“images are not stored once the check is complete, except for fraud prevention purposes”
The exception is the storage system. For fraud reasons they keep face maps, document codes and results in matching databases on timetables of their own, compared against strangers' future checks.
THE MOVE A deletion request naming what they made from your images reaches past them: face maps, codes, fraud entries. The reply, what stayed and why, goes on your record.
“we may use verification data to improve and develop our services, including machine learning”
Improvement means training. Your images and face measurements refine the vendor's next model, usually with the business customer's permission rather than yours, and a model already trained does not unlearn.
THE MOVE A written objection makes them name a reason to keep training. Their reply, and what already went in, goes on your record.
Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply. Start your record →