Privacy Policy

FaceGuessr is a crowd-rating guessing game operated as an online service. This policy applies to the website and related game features. For privacy requests, contact us at faceguessr@gmail.com.

• Account data — email, password (stored hashed by our auth provider), username / display name, and profile fields such as ELO and tier. We also record the date you accepted these terms and confirmed you are 18 or older.
• Photographs of you — the image files you upload, their moderation status, and the ratings they receive. A photograph of your face is personal information, and in some places it is treated as sensitive information. We do not currently run face recognition, face matching, faceprint extraction or any other biometric identification on your photos, and we do not currently generate biometric identifiers or biometric information from them. If we ever introduce a feature that would, we will tell you first and obtain the consent that applicable law requires before it is applied to your photos.
• Ratings — we keep an individual record of every rating submitted in the game: the score, the photo it was about, the account that submitted it, and when. This applies both to ratings you give and ratings your photos receive.
• Gameplay data — guesses, scores, accuracy, lobby participation, and related timestamps.
• Technical data — basic logs, cookies or local storage needed for sign-in, site access, and preferences.

• Operate accounts, games, lobbies, and leaderboards.
• Calculate the crowd average for each photo and the skill rating for each player.
• Moderate uploads, handle reports, and enforce our Terms.
• Improve fairness, performance, and reliability.
• Produce aggregated and de-identified statistics, including datasets we may license (see section 4).
• Develop, train, evaluate and improve models, algorithms and automated scoring using ratings, guesses and other gameplay data.
• Research, analyse trends, and build new features, products and services, including ones not offered today.
• Promote the service, including with aggregate statistics and anonymised examples.
• Any other purpose we describe to you at the time we collect the information.
• Communicate about the service (for example account confirmation or password reset emails).

Part of our business is licensing rating data. You should assume this happens, and decide whether to upload on that basis.

• What we may license — rating values and the statistics derived from them: distributions, averages, rating counts, timing, accuracy, and similar measures.
• What we do not license or sell — your photographs, your email address, your password, or your name or username attached to specific ratings. We do not sell the images themselves, and we do not licence data in a form that identifies the individual who gave a particular rating.
• Your photographs — we license ratings, not faces. Your images are never included in a licensed dataset on the strength of this policy alone. If we ever offer that, it will be a separate, clearly labelled choice you actively make, it will be optional, and declining will not stop you playing.
• De-identification — data we license is stripped of direct identifiers and is keyed by opaque identifiers rather than by account, email or username. We aggregate or anonymise it so that recipients cannot single you out, we do not provide the key that would re-link it, and we require licensees by contract not to attempt re-identification.

Depending on where you live, this activity may be a “sale” or a “sharing” of personal information under laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, even where the data has been de-identified. You have the right to opt out. Email faceguessr@gmail.com with the subject line “Do Not Sell or Share My Data” and we will exclude your data from future licensing. Opting out does not affect your ability to play.

We do not license your uploads for training third-party facial recognition or biometric identification systems.

• Other players — your username, scores and approved photos may be shown to other users in games, leaderboards and galleries. Players who rate your photo are not told whose photo it is, but a photo shown in the game can be seen and recognised by other people.
• Service providers — we use infrastructure providers (for example hosting, and Supabase for auth, database and storage) who process data on our behalf under contract.
• Data licensees — as described in section 4.
• Affiliates and corporate transactions — our affiliates, and any party involved in a financing, reorganisation, merger, acquisition or sale of assets, in which case information may transfer to a successor that is bound by a policy no less protective of you than this one.
• Legal — we may disclose information if required by law or to protect users and the service.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, FaceGuessr is the controller of your personal data and we rely on these bases:

• Contract — creating your account, running games and lobbies, and maintaining leaderboards and skill ratings.
• Consent — hosting and displaying photographs of you, which is why removing a photo or deleting your account withdraws that consent and ends the processing.
• Legitimate interests — moderation, security, abuse prevention, and improving the service, balanced against your rights.
• Legal obligation — responding to lawful requests and keeping records we are required to keep.

Data we license under section 4 is aggregated or anonymised before it leaves us. Once data no longer relates to an identifiable person it falls outside data-protection law, and we do not license personal data about you to third parties for their own purposes.

International transfers — we are based in the United States and our infrastructure providers may process data there and in other regions. Where we move personal data out of the EEA, the UK or Switzerland we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, or the UK Addendum, together with our providers' own transfer safeguards.

These controls are built into the product. Open your profile and use the “Your data” section:

• Access and export — download a machine-readable copy of your profile, your photos and every rating you have given.
• Deletion — delete your account. This removes your login, your profile, your photos and their image files. Ratings you gave other players are kept as anonymous numbers with your identity removed, because deleting them would corrupt other people's scores.
• Removing a photo — remove any photo at any time; it leaves circulation immediately.
• Correction — edit your username and display name in your profile, or email us.
• Opt out of licensing — see section 4. Opting out or deleting your account stops future licensing, but aggregate and de-identified data already produced or already provided to a licensee cannot be recalled, and statistics that no longer identify you may continue to be used.

Depending on your location you may also have rights to object to or restrict processing, to withdraw consent, and to complain to a data protection authority. Where we rely on consent — which is our basis for hosting and displaying your photographs — you can withdraw it by removing the photo or deleting your account. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.

Our Terms allow you to upload photos of yourself only. If you find a photo of yourself that you did not upload, use the Report this photo link shown under any photo during a round, and choose the consent option. That takes the photo out of circulation straight away, before a human reviews it. You can also email faceguessr@gmail.com. You do not need an account for us to act on a request about your own likeness.

We use cookies or similar storage for authentication, the optional site-access gate, and client preferences. We do not use third-party advertising cookies. You can clear site data in your browser; doing so may sign you out or reset local-only stats.

We keep account and gameplay data while your account is active. When you delete your account we remove your profile, photos and image files promptly, and retain only (a) ratings stripped of your identity, (b) a record that a deletion took place, and (c) anything we must keep for security, legal or abuse-prevention reasons. Moderation records about a reported photo are kept after the photo is removed so we can show what action was taken. Aggregate and de-identified data, which no longer identifies you, may be kept indefinitely.

We use industry-standard providers and access controls, enforce permissions at the database level, and restrict administrative access. No online service is perfectly secure; protect your password and device. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, please email faceguessr@gmail.com rather than disclosing it publicly.

FaceGuessr is for users 18+. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and photos of minors are not permitted. If you believe a minor has created an account or appears in an uploaded photo, report the photo or contact us and we will remove it.

The service may be hosted in the United States or other regions. By using FaceGuessr you understand your information may be processed in countries with different data-protection laws than your own.

We may update this Privacy Policy as the service and our business change. When a change is material we will give you notice — in the product, by email, or both — before it takes effect, and continuing to use FaceGuessr after that means you accept the updated policy. Where the law requires your consent for a particular use, we will ask for it rather than relying on notice alone. The “Last updated” date at the top will change when we publish revisions, and if you disagree with a change you can delete your account under section 6.

Privacy questions, export or deletion requests, opt-outs, and takedown requests: email faceguessr@gmail.com.