Privacy Policy

1. Controller and contact

AJ GmbH, Danziger Str. 80, 65191 Wiesbaden, Germany, represented by Dr. Andreas Jahnke, is the controller for the processing described in this policy. You can contact us at privacy@selecttake.com. No data-protection officer has been designated at this time. The contact details in the Legal Notice also apply.

2. What this policy covers

This policy explains how SelectTake processes personal data when you visit the service, create an account, upload or organise images, use optional known-people matching, contact us, or purchase a subscription. It also explains important limits: SelectTake is a private image-organisation service, not a public search, surveillance, identity-verification, or social-networking service.

3. Account and access data

When you sign in, we process your email address, authentication events, account identifiers, and technical security information necessary to deliver one-time passcodes and protect access. We do not operate a fixed-password system. When you create an account, we record the version and time of your acceptance of the Terms of Service and acknowledgement of the Privacy Policy. We also record a one-time adult self-declaration for the current eligibility version; this is not identity or age verification. Your browser may store the authentication session either until the browser is closed or, if you choose “Remember this browser”, beyond that session. This storage is exclusively used for login continuity and no other purposes, including cross-site advertising.

The legal basis is performance of the contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interests in account security, abuse prevention, and reliable service operation (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

4. Images, collections, and analysis

We process the image files, filenames, file type and size, collection names, selected filters, image metadata (which may include date, camera information, and location data if present), generated thumbnails, analysis results, duplicate indicators, and your export or deletion requests. The service uses this information to store your private collection, create previews, organise images, run the requested analysis, and make the resulting filters and exports available to you.

For new uploads, SelectTake temporarily processes the source file to extract available capture metadata and create a verified, optimised JPEG derivative with a maximum dimension of 2048 pixels. Once that derivative is safely stored and verified, the source file is discarded. The retained image and its ZIP download are therefore the optimised JPEG, not necessarily the original HEIC, PNG, Live Photo motion component, original encoding, transparency, or all original metadata. Existing stored images are not changed by this upload process.

Your regular images are private, access-controlled, and encrypted at rest: they are not public or searchable by other users. We use private storage and short-lived signed links that are issued only after the relevant account and collection ownership checks. The service functions that create previews, analyse images, prepare exports, and delete content require privileged technical access to the relevant stored objects. A strictly limited number of authorised platform administrators may also technically access private storage only when necessary to operate, secure, repair, or meet a legal obligation for the service; this is not a user-facing image-browsing feature, is not used for advertising, and is not ordinary manual review of customer collections.

For a requested image analysis, SelectTake sends the prepared analysis image or derivative to OpenAI and may include the original filename. We do not send locally decrypted Known People labels, face descriptors, encrypted vault blobs, or encrypted reference photos to OpenAI. We do not send images to OpenAI for unrelated advertising, public-face-search, or general-model-training purposes. Image analysis is assistive: it can be incomplete or wrong, including duplicate, quality, subject, and keep/review suggestions. It does not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you. You remain in control and must review selections before deleting, sharing, printing, or otherwise using images.

Where shown, upload and analysis time remaining is a convenience estimate based on current batch progress and recent operational measurements. It is not a promise or service-level commitment and can change with file size, connection quality, device performance, provider availability, queueing, and other factors.

5. Optional known-people matching and biometric data

You may upload, organise, and export ordinary family photographs through SelectTake without using Known People. When enabled, Known People creates biometric data and uses it to identify a person against their saved reference. We therefore treat it as special-category biometric processing under Article 9 GDPR. Face-matching software runs in your browser. For references created in the Vault, the label, numerical face descriptor, and compressed reference photo are encrypted on your device before upload; matching and decryption occur only on your device. Our servers store encrypted blobs and minimal consent metadata, not the plaintext reference, label, or descriptor. Older references created before the Vault are disabled and must be recreated in the Vault or deleted; they are not used for matching. Plan limits are Free 2, Starter 5, Pro 10, and Scale 20 saved references.

Before saving or replacing a reference, we require a separate affirmative confirmation that distinguishes your own face from another adult’s face. For your own face, you give explicit consent for this narrow private-account purpose. For another adult, you must first obtain that person’s explicit, informed consent for that same purpose; your confirmation records your assertion but is not a substitute for their consent. References for children are not permitted. Do not use the feature for surveillance, public identification, employment, eligibility, law-enforcement, or other high-impact decisions. Your passphrase cannot be reset. On an unlocked browser, a non-extractable local device key may remain in that browser’s SelectTake site storage so the vault can reopen without another passphrase prompt; clearing SelectTake site data removes that local key. If every unlocked device and the passphrase are lost, the encrypted Known People vault must be erased and recreated. Deleting a profile or erasing the vault removes the associated encrypted reference data and stops future matching. Withdrawal does not affect processing already carried out before it.

The legal basis for your own reference is explicit consent (Articles 6(1)(a) and 9(2)(a) GDPR). A third-party reference is permitted only where that adult has provided explicit, informed consent or another valid Article 9 condition has been documented by qualified legal advice. Known People is not generally available. Access is currently restricted to named test accounts while the biometric data-protection impact assessment and related legal requirements are completed.

6. Optional collection preferences

You can optionally turn on personalisation for an individual collection. If enabled, SelectTake stores only your explicit Keep, Review, and Delete choices for images in that collection to help you review that same collection. After at least three choices, a small explainable scoring rule may refine that collection's suggestions for images without an explicit choice, using already available blur, duplicate, and screenshot results. It does not submit a new image-analysis request or train a model. It does not use face data, known-people data, sensitive traits, or a cross-collection/account-wide behavioural profile; it never automatically deletes an image. You can reset the collection's saved choices at any time. The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR).

7. Payments and subscriptions

For paid plans, Stripe processes payment-method, billing, transaction, invoice, and subscription information. SelectTake receives the subscription status and limited billing identifiers needed to provide the plan and handle support. We do not receive or store full payment-card numbers. The legal basis is contract performance, legal recordkeeping obligations, and fraud prevention. Stripe may act as a processor and, for some payment or regulatory processing, as an independent controller under its own terms and privacy information.

8. Recipients, processors, and transfers

We use Supabase for authentication, database, and private storage; Vercel for hosting and server execution; OpenAI for requested image analysis; Stripe for payment services; and Cloudflare for security challenges and abuse prevention. Access is limited to what is needed for the relevant service. Our Supabase project is hosted in Central EU (Frankfurt, Germany). Processors and subprocessors may nevertheless process data outside the EEA. Where a restricted transfer occurs, we rely on an applicable adequacy decision, Standard Contractual Clauses, or other lawful transfer mechanism as appropriate. You may request information about the relevant transfer safeguards from privacy@selecttake.com.

We select and manage processors through contractual and technical safeguards appropriate to the service. Processors and their subprocessors also have their own legal duties and terms; this does not remove our responsibility to handle personal data lawfully as controller.

9. Feedback and product updates

If you submit in-app feedback, we process the text and submission time so SelectTake administrators can review it. We use account authentication to protect the feedback channel from abuse, but do not store your name, account identifier, or account email with the feedback. A separate, access-controlled abuse-prevention record stores the authenticated account identifier and latest submission time; it contains no feedback content. You may voluntarily add a separate reply email address; if you do, we store it with that feedback only to respond to you. Leaving the field blank keeps the submission anonymous. Anonymous feedback may be retained as operational research after account deletion; feedback with a reply email is deleted or anonymised when it is no longer needed for that reply. Do not include other personal information in the feedback text. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in improving and supporting the service (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

Product-update emails are optional. If you opt in in Settings, we process the email address you provide, your opt-in and withdrawal times, the related account identifier, and a unique unsubscribe token to send SelectTake product and feature news. The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). You can withdraw it at any time in Settings or through the unsubscribe link in a message; this does not affect processing before withdrawal. We do not use this list for behavioural advertising or sell it to third parties.

10. Security, logs, and service reliability

We use access controls, private storage, signed access links, one-time-code authentication, rate limits, CAPTCHA where enabled, and security logging designed to protect the service. We also use your account email to send transactional security notices when you enable, erase, or change the passphrase for a Known People vault. No system is perfectly secure. We process IP-address and request/security information, error messages, and service logs to diagnose failures, prevent abuse, and investigate security incidents. We do not sell personal data or use it for behavioural advertising.

We use Vercel Web Analytics for aggregated service-use and performance statistics. It is configured without custom events and with query strings, URL fragments, and UUIDs removed before page-view data is sent. We do not send image bytes, filenames, collection names, Known People labels, face descriptors, account identifiers, or passphrases through Web Analytics. Vercel describes this Web Analytics product as cookie-free; we use it to understand aggregate page usage and service performance, not to advertise to or profile individuals.

11. Retention and deletion

We retain account, collection, image, descriptor, and analysis data while your account remains open, unless earlier deletion is requested or required. When you delete an image or collection, we remove the associated stored files and mark or remove associated application data as part of the deletion workflow. When you delete your account, we delete account-linked images, collections, analysis data, saved face descriptors, and product-update preferences, and cancel an active subscription as described in the service. Anonymous feedback is not account-linked and may be retained as operational research. We retain only anonymised daily operational totals that cannot be linked back to an account.

When the Free-image retention feature is activated, each image successfully uploaded while an account is on the Free plan is scheduled for deletion 60 days later. If an account returns to the Free plan after a paid period, images that remain stored in that account and are covered by the then-current Free-image policy are scheduled from that return to Free, even if they were originally uploaded during the paid period. The account itself is never deleted by this rule. An active paid plan pauses an already scheduled image’s timer. If fewer than 15 days remained when the paid plan began, we add 15 days to the paused time; when the account later returns to Free, the schedule resumes with that remaining time. We will not silently apply this rule to an existing account before the feature’s activation, required notice, and active acceptance of the updated Terms and Privacy Policy. We will verify the notice-delivery and deletion process before enforcement.

For German tax and accounting purposes, payment, refund, and invoice evidence is generally retained for eight years; accounting books and annual financial statements, where created, for ten years; and relevant business correspondence for six years. We retain only the records required for the applicable category.

Provider backups and deletion propagation have retention windows of their own. Their actual settings must be verified and recorded before launch; backups are not used to restore deleted customer content except where necessary for security, legal, or disaster-recovery purposes.

12. Your rights

Subject to the conditions in applicable law, you may request access, correction, deletion, restriction, portability, or objection to processing. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time with future effect. You may also lodge a complaint with a competent supervisory authority. Because AJ GmbH is established in Wiesbaden, you may contact the Hessian Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information; this does not limit your right to contact another competent authority. Send requests to privacy@selecttake.com. To protect your information, we may ask for reasonable proof that the request comes from you before acting on it.

13. Children and third-party content

SelectTake accounts are for adults aged 18 and over. Accounts for minors are not currently supported, including with parental permission. We ask for an adult declaration; this is not identity or age verification. Contact privacy@selecttake.com if you believe a minor holds an account. If you upload images of other people, you are responsible for having the rights, notices, and permissions needed to do so. That responsibility does not remove our own legal obligations or your statutory rights.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy when the service, processors, or legal requirements change. We will publish the new version with an updated effective date. Material changes affecting existing processing will be communicated where required by law.