Piula · Legal · Draft pending legal review · Last updated 2026-09-04

Biometric Data Policy

Piula uses biometric processing for exactly two purposes: to check that a living person is signing up (liveness), and to check that this person has no other Piula account (one human, one account). This policy explains what we process, what we keep, for how long, and your rights. It applies wherever you live; it is written to meet the GDPR (Article 9), the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and similar laws.

What we process

• During signup and recovery you record a short selfie video in your browser. The video is streamed to Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness in the EU (Ireland, eu-west-1) and analysed for liveness. We do not receive or store the video.
• The liveness service returns a reference frame. We use it in memory to search our private face collection for a match and to enrol your face if there is none. We do not store the frame.
• What remains is a face vector (a mathematical template held by Amazon Rekognition in eu-west-1) and, in our database, its identifier, the liveness confidence score and the time of the check. A face vector cannot be turned back into a photo.

Legal basis and consent

We process this data only with your explicit consent, which you give by ticking the consent box before the face check (GDPR Article 9(2)(a)). You must be 18 or older. You can withdraw consent at any time by deleting your account; without a face check you cannot hold a Piula account, because the check is what keeps bots out for everyone.

Retention and destruction

• Your face vector is kept for as long as your account exists.
• When you delete your account, the vector is deleted from the face collection within 30 days, and the identifier is removed from our database immediately.
• If a person is banned for abuse, we keep their face vector for 12 months so the same person cannot rejoin, then delete it.
• We never sell, lease or trade biometric data, and we never use it for advertising or to identify you to third parties.

Your rights

You can see the date and confidence of your face check in Settings, delete your account and face vector yourself in Settings, and contact hello@piula.app to exercise any other right (access, rectification, objection, complaint to your supervisory authority).

Processors

Amazon Web Services (Rekognition, eu-west-1) processes the video and stores the vector under a data processing agreement. No other party receives biometric data.