What to read before sending anyone fifteen photographs of your face

For most software the terms are a formality. For anything that trains on your face they are the product decision, and a quarter of an hour spent here beats any amount of feature comparison.

What is retained, and for how long

Three separate artefacts, and vendors routinely answer about one: the uploaded photographs, the derived representation trained from them, and the generated portraits.

"We delete your photos after thirty days" says nothing about the model trained on them. Ask about all three separately. Ours is in the privacy policy.

Can the derived representation be deleted

The question that separates serious answers from marketing. Deleting a record is easy. Removing a person's influence from trained weights is genuinely hard, and the honest answer from most vendors is that the adapter is deleted rather than anything being unlearned.

That is fine. It should simply be stated rather than implied.

What you are licensed to do with the output

Where it gets expensive for companies. The terms cover the position, and the thing to check with any vendor is whether you have ownership or a licence, because "we have the photographs" and "we can put them on a billboard" are different rights.

Then, and only then, the product questions

What generated portraits actually are is the mechanism, and studio-style output is the narrower brief where controlled light and background matter more than variety.

If you are generating rather than shooting, the craft moved into the instruction. Not flowery adjectives, which do very little, but the concrete parts: framing, background, lighting direction, lens length. Which prompt patterns survive a diffusion model is a shorter list than the internet suggests, and most of what circulates is superstition.

For companies there is one more layer

Your own people have to have consented, and consent needs a scope. Internal directory and public marketing site are different permissions, and a single yes-or-no field will get one of them wrong. The bad direction is somebody finding their face in a campaign they never approved.

Build the withdrawal path at the same time as the collection path. Twenty minutes now, a legal conversation later.

The short version

Ask what is kept, what is derived, who else is in the chain, and how it gets removed. Get it in writing. If a vendor has no subprocessor page at all, that is your answer.