Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 2026

The short version

We collect the little that running the service requires. We do not sell or trade personal data. We run no advertising, no profiling and no third-party analytics. We do not do biometrics of any kind. Everything below says the same thing in detail.

What we collect

• What you submit. The image, GIF or short video you upload, or the web address of one, together with the report built from it.
• Account details, if you choose to create an account: an e-mail address and a password. The password is stored only in hashed form and cannot be read back by us or by anyone else.
• Technical records needed to keep the service running and to stop abuse: the time of a request, the ordinary headers your browser sends, and a one-way hash of your network address. We keep the hash, not the address.
• Two cookies. One keeps you signed in — or, if you are not signed in, links your reports to this browser so that only you can open them. The other remembers the language you chose. There are no advertising, profiling or third-party tracking cookies on this site.

What we do with it

Only what the service is for: building your report and showing it to you, keeping your own history available, applying fair-use limits, keeping the service available, and preventing abuse. We do not sell, rent or trade personal data, we do not build advertising profiles, and we do not use submitted files to train models.

Pictures of people

Retrace works on images, not on people. We do not create or store biometric templates, we do not run face recognition, and we maintain no collection of any kind that could be used to identify a person by their face. A person's name appears in a report only when public sources independent of one another already publish that name together with the image, and only when the role in question is a public one; it is always presented as a possibility, beside the link it came from. If you are depicted in an image that someone else has checked, you may ask us to remove the report — see Your rights below.

Who else sees your data

Finding out where a picture already appears means asking the open web, so while a check runs, the image — or a fragment, a hash or a description of it — may be sent to publicly available search and archive services. Those services handle such requests under their own policies, and they receive no account details from us. Apart from that, we disclose personal data only where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect our rights or the safety of users. The providers who host our infrastructure process data strictly on our instructions.

How long we keep things

Uploaded files and the working copies made from them are deleted automatically about a month after a check. The stored material a report refers to is kept for up to ninety days for signed-in users and about thirty days without an account. You can ask us to delete a report, or your whole account, at any time.

Security

Connections to the service are encrypted, passwords are hashed, and access to stored data is restricted to the people who need it to run the service. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise; we do commit to handling any incident honestly and promptly.

Your rights

We apply the same standard to everyone who uses Retrace, wherever they live. You may ask us to show you the personal data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its processing, or hand it over in a portable form. You may also withdraw consent where processing rests on it, and complain to your local data protection authority. Write to us through our contact page; we answer such requests within one month.

Children

The service is not intended for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If we learn that we have, we delete it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the revised version appears on this page with a new date at the top. Continuing to use the service after that means the new version applies to you.

Contact

For anything to do with privacy — questions, requests, complaints — use our contact page. See also our Terms of Service and About page.