Biometric Data Policy
Girl Dinner Social Technology LLC (“GDS”) asks every member to take a verification selfie so that GDS stays a women-only community of real, verified people. That check involves a scan of facial geometry, which is biometric data. This policy is the public retention schedule and destruction guideline for that data. It sits alongside our Privacy Policy, which describes everything else we collect.
What we collect and why
- What: a verification selfie, and the facial-geometry analysis derived from it. The analysis is performed by Amazon Rekognition, run on our behalf by Amazon Web Services under contract.
- Why: to confirm the image shows a single, clear, living human face; to compare it against your profile photo so the account is really you; and to support the women-only membership policy. It is used for nothing else.
- Human review: the automated check only clears unambiguous results. Anything uncertain goes to a trained human reviewer. No one is rejected on the automated gender estimate alone.
Retention schedule
- Your selfie and the facial-geometry scan: destroyed within 24 hours of your verification decision. Where a person needed to review your photo, it is destroyed as soon as they decide, and never later than 7 days.
- Face templates: we never build or keep one. The scan produces a single verification result and is not enrolled in any face database, so nothing we keep afterwards can be used to recognise you.
- What remains after that: the result of the check — whether it passed, its confidence score, the perceived-gender reading and its confidence, which provider ran it, the reason for any failure, and when it was decided. This is a result rather than a face scan. It is kept while your account is open, because it is what records that you are verified, and deleted when you delete your account.
- Statutory outer limit: in no case later than three years after your last interaction with GDS. In practice the schedule above is far shorter.
- Your consent record: when you agree to verification we keep a record that you agreed, when, and to which version of this policy. That record is kept for at least five years and is deliberately not deleted when you close your account — see below.
How we destroy it
Destruction means permanent deletion from our production storage and from backups as those backups age out on their normal cycle, such that the data cannot be restored or reconstructed. Deletion is permanent and is not reversible by you or by us. We do not retain a copy for any other purpose once the schedule above is reached.
Your consent record
When you agree to biometric verification, we record that you agreed, the time, the version of this policy you were shown, and the device and network details that identify the request. That record is our proof that the collection was lawful.
It is not biometric data and it cannot be used to recognise you. Deleting your account erases your biometric data but keeps this record, for at least five years, because destroying it would remove the proof while protecting nothing. This is the only thing we keep after account deletion beyond what we describe in the Privacy Policy.
We do not sell or profit from it
We do not sell, lease, trade, or otherwise profit from biometric data, and we never will. We do not use it for advertising, we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers, and we do not use it to train our own models. The only third party that receives it is Amazon Web Services, acting as our processor under contract to perform the check described above.
Disclosure
We do not disclose biometric data to anyone else unless you consent, unless it completes a transaction you requested, or unless we are required to by law, warrant, or subpoena.
How we protect it
Biometric data is encrypted in transit and at rest, held in storage that is not publicly accessible, and reachable by a limited number of people who need it to do the review described above. We apply at least the standard of care we use for other confidential information, and no less than the reasonable standard of care in our industry.
Your choices
Selfie verification is a required step of signing up, so declining it means we can't finish creating your account — but you can decline. You can request earlier deletion of any stored verification data, or ask what we hold, by emailing hello@girldinnersocial.com. You can delete your account at any time in the app at Profile → Settings → Delete Account.
Changes & contact
If we change this policy we'll update the “Last updated” date above and, for significant changes, notify you in the app or by email. Questions: hello@girldinnersocial.com.