Activation Photo & Likeness Notice

What the activation photo is

When you activate a ticket, you take a photo — right then, through your camera, in the app. It shows how you look tonight. It is not a profile picture, it is not a gallery, and it does not persist between sessions. One photo, one activation. When the session ends, the photo is deleted and your next activation requires a new one.

Why we require it

It stops bait-and-switch: the person you meet is the person you saw. It is a liveness signal at the moment that counts, not just at signup weeks earlier. It makes the map usable. And it makes consent real — when someone asks you for a date, you are looking at an actual current photo of an actual person before you decide.

How it is captured

Live camera capture only. You cannot upload from your camera roll; the control does not exist. One photo per activation, enforced technically. No filters, no editing, no retouching, no beautification — we do not offer the tools. Your face must be visible and unobscured. You can retake it as many times as you like until your ticket enters standby.

Who sees it

Verified, approved participants in the same active session, in the same service area, during the same operating window. Specifically: Ticket B members browsing the candidate map, and the Ticket A member receiving a date request. Venue staff see it at check-in only, to confirm the right person arrived. Our operators see it only through an audited surface, and every single view writes an audit record. Our moderation provider screens it automatically at capture.

Never: the public — it never appears on our website, our marketing, or the Local Date Pulse. Never anyone outside your active session, service area, and operating window. Never search engines; there is no public URL to index. Never advertisers or data brokers. Never any model training pipeline — we do not train anything on your face and we do not permit our providers to.

How it is protected

Stored in private object storage. No public bucket, no permanent URL, no hotlinkable asset. Served only through short-lived signed links scoped to an authenticated participant who is in your session, in your window, in your area. The link expires, and it cannot be forwarded usefully — following someone else’s link does not show them your photo. Image data, storage keys, and links are excluded by design from analytics, application logs, and error reports. Staff access is logged and audited.

How long it exists

Your photo is deleted when your session ends. That is the default and it applies to almost every photo we handle. The single exception: if a report or safety incident references your session, the photo is placed on a retention hold and kept so we can investigate, or longer if legally required. It is deleted at the end of that period. Deletion is verified, not assumed — a scheduled process confirms photos are actually gone and alerts us to any that were not.

Moderation

Every photo is screened automatically before your ticket can go live. Screening looks for sexual content, apparent minors, violence, and images that are not a live photo of the person activating. If a photo is rejected, your ticket returns to the ready stage and you are asked to retake it with a plain-language reason. Repeated rejections go to an operator for review rather than looping you. An operator can also reject a photo; when they do, the reason is logged.

Rules about other people’s photos

These are permanent-ban offenses: screenshotting, photographing, screen-recording, or otherwise capturing another participant’s photo; saving or keeping a copy; resharing it anywhere; using a photo to identify, locate, or contact someone outside the date; or using anyone’s photo to create, edit, or generate other images.

We want to be honest about the limit here. We cannot technically prevent a screenshot in a web browser — nobody can. What we can do is minimise how long a photo is visible, make the rule explicit, permanently remove anyone who breaks it, and treat resharing as a serious safety incident. If you believe your photo was captured or reshared, contact us and we will preserve records and investigate immediately.

Your consent and your rights

You consent to photo capture and display at onboarding, and confirm it again at your first activation. The consent is versioned and recorded. You can withdraw consent at any time between sessions. Withdrawing it means you can no longer activate a ticket, since the photo is required to participate. It does not retroactively interrupt a date in progress, and it does not affect your right to a refund for unused tickets.

Is this biometric data?

A photograph on its own is generally not “biometric data” under US state privacy laws. Those laws typically apply when an image is processed to generate an identifier — a faceprint or template — used to identify a person. We do not generate faceprints or biometric templates from activation photos; they are stored and displayed as images, and deleted.

Our separate identity verification at signup does involve face comparison between your selfie and your ID. That processing is more likely to constitute biometric processing. We disclose it, we obtain your consent for it, and it is described in the Privacy Policy. We treat activation photos with biometric-grade care regardless of the legal classification, because the practical risk to you does not depend on it.

What we promise

We will never make your photo public. We will never sell it or share it with advertisers or data brokers. We will never train a model on it, or let a provider do so. We will never keep it after your session ends, absent an open incident or a legal obligation. We will never build a persistent photo profile of you. And we will tell you if we ever change any of the above, and ask for fresh consent rather than assume it.