What happens to your photo.

This policy explains how idphotos.co.nz collects, uses, stores and discloses personal information, as required by the Privacy Act 2020. A photo of your face is personal information, and we treat it as the sensitive thing it is.

The short version

• The live camera feed never leaves your device. The face tracking that frames you runs entirely in your browser.
• Only the single photo you capture is sent to us — for the compliance check, and for the background cleanup if you buy one.
• That photo is passed to OpenAI in the United States to do those two jobs. This is the most important thing on this page.
• We do not store your photo. It is held in memory for the seconds the request takes and then discarded. Your finished files exist only in your own browser and downloads.
• We never see your card details. Stripe handles payment entirely.
• There are no accounts, no tracking cookies, and no advertising.

Who we are

idphotos.co.nz is an independent New Zealand service making ID photos for passports, licences and other official documents. We are not affiliated with the Department of Internal Affairs, Te Tari Taiwhenua, Waka Kotahi, the New Zealand Police, or any other government agency. For anything in this policy, contact us at [email protected].

What we collect

Your photo

When you take a photo in the booth, that one still image is sent to our server so it can be assessed against the New Zealand rules for the document you are applying for. If your background needs fixing and you buy a photo, the image is sent a second time so the background can be replaced.

The video preview you see while lining up is not uploaded. The face-tracking model runs locally in your browser, which is why the guidance works before you have paid us anything.

Payment information

Payments are processed by Stripe. The card form is served by Stripe inside a secure frame — card numbers are never entered into our page and never reach our servers. Stripe passes us a record of the payment: the amount, the outcome, the last four digits, and the email address you give for your receipt. Stripe's own handling of your data is covered by the Stripe Privacy Policy.

Technical information

Our server records your IP address in memory in order to apply rate limits, which is what stops one person from running up the AI costs for everyone. We do not build profiles from it, and it is not written to a database.

Sending your photo overseas

This is the disclosure that matters most, and it is required by information privacy principle 12 of the Privacy Act.

Your captured photo is sent to OpenAI, L.L.C., in the United States, for two purposes:

• The compliance check — a vision model reads the photo and reports which New Zealand rules it does or does not meet.
• The background cleanup — if you buy a photo whose background fails, an image model replaces the background only.

OpenAI processes this data as our service provider under its API terms. Under those terms, data sent through the API is not used to train OpenAI's models, and OpenAI may retain API inputs and outputs for a limited period (up to 30 days at the time of writing) for abuse monitoring before deleting them. Their handling is governed by the OpenAI Privacy Policy.

United States privacy law does not offer the same protections as the Privacy Act 2020. If you would rather your photo did not go overseas, do not use this service — a pharmacy or AA photo counter is the alternative, and we would genuinely rather you took it than felt misled.

How long we keep things

• Your photo: not retained by us at all. It exists in our server's memory only for the duration of the request.
• Your finished files: stored only on your own device. We cannot re-send you a photo, because we do not have it.
• Payment records: held by Stripe, and retained for seven years as New Zealand tax law requires.
• Rate-limit records: held in memory for one hour, then gone.
• Support emails: kept while we need them to help you, and no longer than two years.

Who else sees your information

Only the providers we need to run the service: OpenAI (the photo, as described above), Stripe (payment), Plausible (anonymous, aggregated visit counts — see below), and our hosting provider (which transmits the requests). We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not disclose it to anyone else unless the law requires it.

Cookies and analytics

We use Plausible, a privacy-focused analytics service, to count visits and see which pages and steps people use. It sets no cookies and collects no personal information — no names, no profiles, no cross-site tracking, and IP addresses are not stored. What we see is aggregate numbers: how many people visited, which pages, and how far through the steps they got. Your photo is never involved in any of it.

Beyond that we set no tracking or advertising cookies. Stripe sets its own cookies within the payment frame for fraud prevention — that is a necessary part of taking a payment safely, and it is described in Stripe's policy linked above.

Children's photos

If you are taking a photo of a child, you must be their parent or legal guardian, or have that person's permission. Everything in this policy applies to their photo exactly as it applies to yours.

Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to ask what personal information we hold about you and to ask us to correct it. Email [email protected] and we will respond within 20 working days. In practice the answer is usually short, because the only thing we hold is a payment record at Stripe.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz or 0800 803 909.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, the payment form is isolated inside Stripe's frame, and your photo is never written to disk on our side. No system is perfect, and we will tell affected people promptly if we ever have a privacy breach that warrants it.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and the date at the top of it. Material changes will be explained here rather than slipped in quietly.

See also our Terms of Service.