How View Finder looks after your data

Your account

To create an account we ask for your full name, a username, your email address, your phone number and a password. Your name and username show on your profile (photographers and organisers) and next to what you post. Your email is used to sign you in and to send you messages about your account. If you tick the weekly email (at sign-up, on My photos or on Find me), we also send you one email a week listing new event albums; every one has a link to stop it, and you can switch it off on My photos. Your phone number is never shown to anyone, including other members. Your password is stored scrambled by our sign-in provider: nobody at View Finder can see it.

Photographers and organisers can add a bio, an Instagram handle and a contact email to their public profile. Those show to everyone, so only add what you're happy to share.

Photos

Photographers upload their own photos and choose who can see each album: public, or private with an album code. The full-resolution original is kept in private storage and only handed out as a download from an album you can open. The copies shown on the site are smaller versions with all camera details removed.

We remove the GPS location from every photo, including the original that downloads give out. Other camera details in the original (such as the camera model and settings) stay, as photographers expect.

If you're in a photo and want it taken down, ask the photographer, or email us and we'll help.

Find yourself: face and bib search

With a free account you can search for photos of yourself with a selfie or a photo from the event, and search race albums by your bib number. This is how it works:

• The photo you search with is sent to our face-matching service, used for that one search and then thrown away. We don't keep it.
• Faces in albums. When a photographer uploads to a public event album or a private album, our face-matching service makes a face pattern for each face in the photo: a set of numbers that can be compared, not a picture. Public photoshoots, portraits and other non-event albums are not scanned.
• Private albums have their own separate face store. They can only be searched from inside the album, by someone who has its code, and never show up in searches anywhere else unless the photographer chooses that.
• Race bibs. In albums the photographer marks as having race bibs, the numbers on bibs are read so you can search by yours.
• Search records. For each search we note when it happened, what kind it was, whether it found anything and how many photos, plus a code for your device that changes every day. That lets us limit searches (10 an hour) and keep costs in check. It holds no photo, no face pattern and no IP address.

Face patterns made from an album's photos are deleted when the photo or album is deleted, or when the album moves between public and private (they're then made again in the right store).

Spotted alerts and your face data

If you choose to, you can verify your face with one selfie so we can tell you when you're in a new album. We keep a face pattern made from that selfie, not the selfie itself, and only ever compare it with public event albums. It's never compared with private albums and never shown or shared.

When there's a match, the photos are added to your Find me page and we email you once per album (never once per photo). You can turn alerts off, take a new selfie or delete your face data any time on the Spotted alerts page. Deleting removes your face pattern from View Finder and from our face-matching service; photos already in your Find me stay until you remove them. After deleting, you can verify again after an hour. Please use only photos of yourself on your account: it keeps your matches accurate.

Visits and statistics

To show photographers how their albums are doing, we count visits, downloads and likes. A visitor is counted with a code that changes every day, so we can tell how many different people visited without tracking anyone from day to day. We don't store IP addresses. We note which site sent you (for example Instagram or WhatsApp) and whether you're on a phone or a computer.

We use a few small storage items in your browser to keep you signed in, remember light or dark mode, remember album codes you've entered and remember where you are in the site tour. We don't use advertising or tracking scripts.

Who helps us run View Finder

We use a small number of services to run the site. They only process data to do that job for us:

• Supabase: accounts, sign-in and our database.
• Backblaze and Cloudflare: storing photos and delivering them quickly.
• Vercel: hosting the website.
• Amazon Web Services (Rekognition): face matching and reading race bibs.
• Resend: sending emails such as invites, spotted alerts and the weekly new-albums email (only if you asked for it).

Your choices

• Change your name and profile details from your account pages.
• Turn spotted alerts off, or delete your face data, on the Spotted alerts page.
• Tap “Not me” on any album in Find me to remove it.
• Switch the weekly new-albums email on or off on My photos, or use the link at the bottom of any of those emails.
• Delete your account any time, here or in the app. To get a copy of your data, email hello@viewfinder.photo and we'll do it.

Questions

Email hello@viewfinder.photo. We'll update this page as View Finder grows and say at the top when it last changed.