How does face recognition work, and what is stored?
Face recognition is off by default. If you switch it on in your profile, our servers in Europe group your photos by person; switching it off erases everything again.
As long as you do nothing, we do not look for faces and store nothing about them. If you switch the feature on in your profile (available from 100 GB of storage), our own servers in Europe process your library in the background. Per face found we keep three things: the position in the photo, a small crop for the People page, and an embedding, a short series of numbers that summarises the face mathematically.
Embeddings live only in our database. They appear in no API response, go to no third party and are used for nothing other than grouping photos within your own account. If you switch the feature off, everything connected to it is fully erased.
For accounts of children aged 13 to 15 there is one more lock in front of all this: uploading only works after a parent has confirmed the sign-up via an e-mail link. The full explanation is in how face recognition stays private; why we never train AI on your photos at all is its own story.