Privacy Policy (Draft)

Who we are

This tool helps you prepare a photo that meets the Saudi e-Visa photo requirements for Hajj and Umrah applications. We are not affiliated with the UK Home Office, the Saudi government, or the official Saudi e-Visa system. This is an independent tool. Whether your final photo is accepted is entirely at the discretion of the real visa portal you submit it to — we check against the published specification as best we can, but we cannot guarantee acceptance.

What we collect

• The photo you upload. This is the core of the service — we use it to detect your face, check it against the e-Visa photo rules, remove the background, and produce a correctly sized, compressed final image.
• An email address, only if you choose to give one. On the results page there is an optional, unchecked-by-default checkbox to have your finished photo emailed to you as a direct attachment (never a link back to our service) so you have a backup copy under your own control. If you don't tick it, we never ask for or store an email address.
• Payment details are handled by Stripe, not by us. When you pay, you enter your card details directly into Stripe's own checkout — we never see or store your full card number. We only receive confirmation from Stripe that payment succeeded (or was partially captured) and the amount involved.
• No account, login, or password. There is no sign-up. Access to your order and photos is via a unique order link (an unguessable ID generated for your order) rather than a username and password.
• Ordinary technical data that any web service receives (such as IP address and browser type from server request logs) may be captured incidentally by our hosting infrastructure, but we do not build any profile from it.

Why we collect it

We process your photo to provide the service you are using: checking it against the e-Visa photo rules and, once you pay, producing the compliant final image. We believe the most cautious way to describe our legal basis under UK GDPR is that processing is necessary to perform the contract you ask us to perform when you pay for a photo (and, for the free check before payment, our legitimate interest in letting you preview the service) — but this framing has not been confirmed by a lawyer and should be treated as provisional, not a settled legal position.

If you opt in to email backup delivery, we use the email address you give us solely to send that one attachment and for nothing else.

How long we keep your photo

• Unpaid or abandoned uploads are automatically deleted a short time after upload if no payment is completed (currently a few hours, via a scheduled cleanup process).
• Originals are deleted immediately once your paid photo has finished processing — we do not keep the photo you originally uploaded once the final compliant image has been produced from it.
• The finished photo is kept on our server for a limited window after processing (currently 24 hours) so you can download it — your order link is the only way to access it during that window, after which it is permanently deleted.
• If you use the optional email backup, a copy of the finished photo is sent as a direct attachment to the address you provide. Once delivered, that copy lives in your own email inbox, outside our control and outside this policy — it is not something we can delete or retrieve on your behalf, and how long it stays there depends on you and your email provider.

Children's data

Hajj and Umrah are often applied for as a family, and a parent or guardian may upload a photo of a child using this tool on the child's behalf. We want to be plain about this rather than pretend it doesn't happen: we do not currently have a separate consent flow, age check, or additional safeguard for photos of children beyond what is described elsewhere on this page. If you are uploading a child's photo, the same collection, use, and retention described here applies to it.

Open question: is this “special category” biometric data?

Our photo-processing pipeline uses automated face detection (to find, check, and crop around a face) as part of producing your compliant photo. UK GDPR treats data used to uniquely identify a person through facial recognition as “special category biometric data,” which carries stricter requirements than ordinary personal data. Whether our use of face detection for cropping and compliance-checking (as opposed to identifying who you are) falls into that stricter category is a genuine open legal question we have not resolved, and this draft does not assume an answer either way. This is specifically flagged for the legal review this policy still needs.

Who else sees your data

• Stripe processes your payment. Stripe receives your card details directly — we never do. See Stripe's own privacy policy for how they handle that data.
• Resend is the email delivery provider we use only if you opt in to the email-backup feature, and only to send that one message containing your photo. If you don't opt in, Resend never sees anything related to your order.
• We do not sell your data, and we do not use your photo for anything beyond producing the image you asked for.

ICO registration

Under UK GDPR, registering with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is required for a service like this that processes personal data commercially, regardless of whether it charges money. This registration is in progress and not yet complete. We are not publishing a registration number here because none exists yet — once registered, this section will be updated with the real number.

Your rights

Subject to the legal review this page still needs, UK GDPR gives you rights over your personal data, including the right to know what we hold, to ask us to correct or delete it, and to object to certain processing. In practice, for most users this is already the default behaviour of this product — your photo is deleted on a short timer automatically — but if you want anything deleted sooner, or have any question about your data, please contact us using the details below.

Contact

[contact email to be added]

Changes to this policy

Because this is a first draft pending legal review, this page should be expected to change — likely substantially — before it is relied upon as a finished policy.