What to read before sending fifteen photographs of your face anywhere

Every service in this category asks for the same thing: a handful of photographs of your face from different angles. That is where the portrait comes from.

A single photo is an image. Fifteen of the same person from different perspectives is a set from which the shape of that face can be computed, and that is a different category of thing.

The document that matters most is the boring one

The subprocessor list. It names the third-party companies that actually touch your images. No vendor this size runs its own datacentres, so the existence of a list is normal — what tells you something is how many names are on it and which countries they sit in.

Read it before the privacy policy. It is shorter and harder to write vaguely.

The clause people should look for and do not

A retention period with a number in it. Not "we take privacy seriously" — a number. A service that keeps your source photographs indefinitely rarely says so; it says so by the absence of a figure.

The second question, rarely asked: are your images used for training? Not "are they shared", which is a different question with a more comforting answer. Whether they feed the model that serves other people. Silence on that point is itself information.

When it stops being your decision

The moment an employer uploads photographs of staff, a different legal regime applies. Those are third parties' personal data, and consent is collected by the employer, not the vendor. The processing annex is where that detail lives, and it is the point at which a fifteen-minute decision becomes a matter for legal.

If you are the person being asked, the reasonable request is simple: ask what the retention period is and whether declining is genuinely optional.

The one that only matters if you recommend things

The affiliate policy governs anyone earning commission on referrals. Worth reading if you write about this category, irrelevant otherwise.

Meanwhile, the ordinary use

Most people are not doing any of this at company scale. They want one photograph that works on a CV, where the applicable conventions are narrower than for portraits generally, and current practice varies more by country than by industry — standard in Spain and Germany, actively suspect in the UK and often stripped before shortlisting.

And occasionally on something printed. A business card is the hardest case in this whole subject: the face ends up about fifteen millimetres tall, which removes everything except the outline.

Related: The photo is the last thing anyone fixes

More on this: The selfies you upload decide more than the tool you pick