What happens to your photo

This is the plain-language version of what happens to the photograph you send. The privacy policy is the formal one; where they differ, the formal one governs.

Before it leaves your phone

Your browser opens the photograph, turns it into a JPEG and shrinks it. Two things happen in that step that are worth knowing.

Your photograph is prepared here, on your device, whatever format it is in. The browser reads it, drops its metadata and hands over a plain photograph; some formats neither our server nor the cutting service can read at all, so the work has to happen on your side either way.

The camera data is removed here too, and never reaches us. A phone photograph carries the coordinates of where it was taken — usually somebody's home — along with the date and the model of phone. What we receive is a picture and nothing else. We are not deleting that data carefully; we never have it.

On our server

The prepared photograph is written to a folder named by a long random string, kept for 7 days, and then deleted along with everything made from it. The address of that folder cannot be guessed or counted up to from somebody else's.

We keep the photograph rather than throwing it away immediately so that a failed set can be run again without you finding and uploading it a second time.

Where it goes

Twice to fal.ai, a company in the United States: once to have the product cut out of the background, once to have a new background built. It travels inside the request rather than as a link, so it is never sitting at an address anybody could visit.

fal's own privacy policy says it collects the content sent to it. It links to a page describing how long inputs and outputs are kept — and at the time of writing that page could not be reached. So we cannot tell you how long your photograph exists on their side, and we are not going to guess. This is being chased.

What we do not do with it

We do not show it to anybody else, use it as an example, publish it, or train anything on it. Nobody at BASILDON LIMITED looks at your photographs as a matter of course — only if you write to us about one and ask us to.

Why this leaves Europe at all

The cutting is done by a company in the United States because that is where the machine that does it well lives. We would rather it were closer, and if an equal one appears inside Europe we will move.

Sending personal data out of the European Economic Area needs a safeguard the law recognises. A photograph of a product on a kitchen table can be personal data — the kitchen is somebody's. The privacy policy says where that stands, honestly, including the part still unfinished.

If you would rather it did not

Then this service is not for you, and we would rather say so than take your money and hope you do not mind. There is no way to use it without the photograph going to the cutting service: that step is the service.

You can, of course, close your account at any time and everything goes with it.

What comes back

The 4 files are yours. Use them anywhere, sell what they show, no credit needed. We claim nothing over them.