Trust & safety
Your face, your photos, your money — handled with care.
PodiumBase matches race photos to athletes using face recognition. That only works if you trust us with a selfie — so here is exactly what we do, in plain language, with links to the full policies.
Your selfie & face data
- Your selfie is deleted within 60 seconds of matching. We use it only to find your photos, then it’s gone — we never store it. Only the matched-photo IDs come back.
- Face data is scoped to a single race. The mathematical face representation lives in a per-event collection that is permanently deleted when the event closes (or on the race director’s purge, or within 60 days of the event — whichever comes first). We do not cross-match faces between events.
- You can opt out anytime. Turn off face matching for your profile in your athlete settings, or email privacy@podiumbase.io to delete face data we’ve already processed.
- We never sell or rent biometric data. The only sub-processor is AWS Rekognition, under a written data-processing agreement.
Full retention schedule and your rights: Biometric processing FAQ →
Payments & refunds
Searching for your photos is free — you only pay if you buy one, as a one-time license with no subscription. Card payments are processed by Stripe; PodiumBase never sees or stores your full card number. If something’s wrong with a purchase, our refund policy explains how it’s handled.
Photos & ownership
Photographers own their work and set it on the platform; athletes buy a license to the photos they appear in. Race directors control which photographers cover their event and can manage their event’s data, including purging face data, from event settings.
State biometric laws
For our V1 launch, the selfie photo-search surface is gated for visitors located in Illinois pending external-counsel review against the latest Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) case law. Illinois athletes can still find their photos by bib number. Texas and Washington residents see the normal selfie flow; EU/UK residents retain full GDPR rights independent of our default flow.
Questions?
Privacy or data-rights questions go to privacy@podiumbase.io. Anything else, contact us.