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 are processed on your device

Face detection, cropping and background replacement run entirely on your phone, using on-device machine learning models bundled with the app. Your photos are not transmitted to us on this path, and we have no ability to view them. Exported files are written to your own device storage or shared by you to an app of your choosing.

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

The one exception: optional Pro cleanup

On-device background separation has limits, particularly around fine hair edges. The app offers an optional higher-quality cleanup that performs this step on a server. It sends a single image, and only after you explicitly approve a dialog that states what is being sent and why. If you decline, the app continues with the on-device result.

The image is used for that one processing operation and deleted immediately afterwards. It is not stored, not associated with any account, and not used to train models. The request is routed through our own server endpoint so that no third-party credentials sit inside the app. If the server processing fails, the app falls back to the on-device result and does not consume a paid credit.

What the app collects

• Anonymous crash reports and basic usage diagnostics, used to find and fix defects. These do not contain your photos.
• Purchase and entitlement state from the App Store or Google Play, so the app knows whether you have paid. Payment itself is handled by Apple or Google — we never see your card details.
• Advertising identifiers used by the ad network on the free tier. Ads are banner and rewarded-video only; there are no full-screen interstitials.
• An optional email address, if you choose to sign in so that purchases can be restored across devices. Sign-in is never required.

Advertising

The free tier of the app shows advertising supplied by Google AdMob. 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. Purchasing the ad-free tier removes advertising entirely.

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 sent for optional Pro cleanup: deleted immediately after processing.
• Crash and diagnostic records: retained in aggregated form only, and not linked to you.
• Purchase records: retained for as long as required by the app stores and by tax law.
• 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 not transmitted to us unless the parent explicitly approves the optional Pro cleanup.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, or to object to its processing. In practice we hold very little: if you have only ever read this website, we hold nothing that identifies you at all. 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 perform the optional Pro cleanup may process data in other countries. Where that happens, it happens under the terms those providers offer for international transfers.

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.