Privacy policy

This policy explains what the PhotoID app and this website collect, what they do not collect, and how to reach us about it.

PhotoID is operated by Samji ICT, a sole proprietorship registered in the Republic of Korea. You can reach us at any time at samji.ict@gmail.com.

Photos never leave your phone

When you take or select a photo, everything happens locally: face detection, cropping and resizing to the document specification, background replacement using an on-device segmentation model, the compliance checks, and the file export. All of it uses models bundled with the app.

None of this requires a network connection, and you can verify that yourself — put the phone in airplane mode and the entire app still works. We do not operate a server that receives photos. There is nothing for us to store, nothing to leak, and nothing to hand over if we were asked.

No account is required to use any feature. You can select a specification, take a photo, have it cropped and processed, and export it without ever identifying yourself to us.

Where your finished photo goes

When you save a photo it is written to your device’s gallery, in an album named "Photo ID". When you share one it goes to whichever app you pick. Both are actions you take deliberately, and neither sends anything to us.

What the app collects

• An advertising identifier, used by Google AdMob to select and measure ads. This is the only identifier that leaves your device.
• Anonymous crash reports and basic usage diagnostics, used to find and fix defects. These never contain your photos.
• Your language preference and your recently used specifications — both stored locally on the device and never sent anywhere.

We collect no account, no email address and no purchase history. This version of the app has no sign-in and no in-app purchases, so none of those exist to collect.

Advertising

The app is funded by advertising supplied by Google AdMob: a banner while you work, and a full-screen advert after every third export. AdMob may use an advertising identifier held by your device to select and measure ads. You can reset or limit that identifier in your device settings — on iOS under Privacy & Security, on Android under Ads — and the app continues to work either way.

Permissions the app asks for

• Camera — to take your photo, requested only when you open the capture screen.
• Photo selection — handled by your system’s photo picker. We receive only the single image you pick and get no access to the rest of your library.

What this website collects

There is no sign-up, no contact form, no comment box and no account. You can read every specification here without giving us anything, and we set no advertising cookies and do no cross-site tracking.

We do measure traffic, using Vercel Web Analytics — our hosting provider’s built-in tool. It is cookieless: it stores nothing on your device and does not use local storage. It records aggregate page views along with the referring page, an approximate location at country level, and your device type, browser and operating system. It does not follow you to other websites and does not build an advertising profile. We use it only to see which specification pages people actually need.

Our hosting provider also keeps standard server logs, as any web host does, and we do not use them to build a profile of you. If you email us, we hold that email until the exchange is finished.

Data retention

• Photos: not applicable. We never receive them, so there is nothing to retain or delete.
• Crash and diagnostic records: retained in aggregated form only, and not linked to you.
• Emails you send us: kept only as long as the correspondence needs.

Children

The app is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Parents do commonly use the app to make passport photos of children, and that is an intended use — those photos are processed on the device under the same rules as any other photo, and are never transmitted to us.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights under the GDPR, the CCPA or Korea’s PIPA, including access, correction, deletion, portability and objection. In practice we hold very little: if you have only ever read this website, we hold nothing that identifies you at all, and because we never receive your photos there is nothing on our side to request deletion of. Email samji.ict@gmail.com to make a request. We answer within five business days.

International transfers

We are based in the Republic of Korea, and the services we use to host this website and to serve advertising may process data in other countries. Where that happens, it happens under the terms those providers offer for international transfers.

If we add server processing later

On-device background separation has limits, particularly around fine hair edges, and a future update may offer an optional higher-quality cleanup that performs that one step on a server. It is not in this build and no such code runs today. If it ships, it will send a single image only after you approve a dialog that says exactly what is being sent, it will ask every time rather than once, and this page will be rewritten before that build reaches the stores.

Changes to this policy

If we change how the app or this site handles your data, we will update this page and change the date at the top of it. Material changes affecting the app will also be surfaced in the app itself rather than only here.