LOOKSMASH

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 7 October 2026

In short

  • You can vote without giving us your name or email. To upload photos you need an email account.
  • Your photos are checked automatically on our own servers for a face and for nudity. We do not identify who is in a photo, and we never store facial features.
  • Other players see your published photos in battles, without your username. Once your main photo has played 30 battles and is among the 100 best of its gender, it appears on the leaderboard with its rating; your username appears there only if you turn that on.
  • If you share your card, anyone with its link can see your main photo with its rating, tier and rank (only the photo while your rank is still locked), and your username only if you turn that on for the card. Search engines do not index it.
  • We do not sell your data and we do not show ads. We use no tracking cookies.
  • You can ask us at any time to see or delete your data: [email protected].

1. Who is responsible

The controller under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is:
Arsen Pysaryk
Postal address: see the Impressum.
Email: [email protected]

LookSmash is run by a private individual. There is no data protection officer, as none is required.

2. Visiting the website

When you open LookSmash, your browser sends technical data that every website receives: your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser and device type. Our hosting provider (Vercel) processes it to deliver the pages and to protect the service against attacks, and keeps it in short-lived server logs. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a secure, working website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

While LookSmash is a closed beta, a cookie stores your invite pass for 30 days, so you do not have to enter the invite code again. It contains no personal data beyond the pass.

3. Playing without an account

When you start voting, we create an anonymous account for you: a random identifier, kept in a cookie in your browser. Before it is created, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that you are not a bot (see section 10). With this account we store the battles shown to you, your votes, and the time you confirmed that you are 18 or older. Your choice of battle type is remembered in your browser's local storage, and so is which new tier or Peak Elo the Stats tab has already congratulated you on, so it does so only once.

To limit vote fraud, we count votes per day for a keyed hash (HMAC) of your IP address. We never store the IP address itself, the hash is not linked to your votes, and the daily counts are deleted after two days. Votes from accounts without email count less toward ratings.

Legal basis: providing the game you asked for (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in fair ratings and protection against abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

If you start playing through someone's shared card, we record that player as the one who brought you. They only see how many players they brought, never who. The record is deleted with either account. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in knowing how the game spreads (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

4. Email account and profile

To upload photos you add an email address. We send sign-in links to it through Resend. In your profile we store a username, your gender (battles only compare people of the same gender), the time you confirmed that you are 18 or older and the person in your photos, the time you last changed your username or your main photo, and whether your username may be shown on the leaderboard (off unless you turn it on). Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

5. Photos and automatic checks

When you upload a photo, our server decodes it, removes all metadata (for example the location data a phone camera adds) and stores a new copy. It also computes a tiny blurred preview and a perceptual fingerprint of the image, which helps us notice when the same photo is uploaded again.

Before a photo is published, our server checks it automatically:

  • that it is a real image in the right format and size;
  • that it shows exactly one face. The face detector only finds where a face is, so that a black bar can be placed over the eyes. It does not recognize or identify anyone. Facial landmarks exist only in memory during the check; we store only the position and size of the black bar.
  • that it is not sexually explicit. A classifier estimates the likelihood of nudity. Clearly explicit photos are refused; borderline photos are published but marked for review by a person. We store only that mark, never the scores.

Both checks run on our own servers. No photo is sent to an outside AI service. These checks decide automatically whether a photo is published. If you think a decision is wrong, write to us and a person will look at it.

A published photo is stored under a random, unguessable web address and shown to other players in battles. Your username is not shown next to it. If your main photo has played at least 30 battles and is among the 100 best of its gender, the leaderboard shows it to signed-in players with its rating, peak rating and tier; your username is shown next to it only if you turn this on on the Stats tab, and you can turn it off at any time. People may also review your photos in our moderation queue.

Once your main photo is published, you can share its card from the Stats tab: an image and a link under a random, unguessable web address. Anyone who has the link, including people without an account, sees your main photo with its current rating, tier, Top X % and rank once your rank is open; before that the card shows only the photo and says that your rank is locked. Your username appears on the card only if you turn this on for the card, separately from the leaderboard switch. We ask search engines not to index these pages. The card is taken down within about ten minutes when the photo is no longer your main photo, is deleted or hidden, or your account is banned. Images you saved or posted elsewhere stay where you put them. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR (you choose to share).

When you delete a photo, its image files are removed at once. Its record without the image (its rating, the perceptual fingerprint, and the marks described above) stays until you delete your account, so the rating rules cannot be bypassed by deleting and uploading again.

Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, and Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR for keeping the service free of abusive content.

6. Votes and ratings

Each vote is stored with the voter's account, the two photos and how the ratings changed. Ratings (Elo) are calculated only from votes. Your own photos' ratings are shown to you. A rating reflects the anonymous choices of other players and is not an objective judgement of anyone. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.

7. Reports, moderation and the contact form

If you report a photo in the app, we store the report with your account and the reason. Moderators' decisions are logged. If you use the contact form, we store your name, email address, your message, the link you gave us, and a keyed hash of your IP address to limit abuse; Cloudflare Turnstile checks the form for bots. We keep messages for 12 months after we have dealt with them. Emails to us are kept as long as needed to answer them and to document the outcome.

Legal basis: our legal obligations to act on notices of illegal content (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR) and our legitimate interest in a safe service (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

8. Error reports

When something breaks, the app sends an error report to Sentry (EU data region): the error, the page path, and your browser and device type. Before a report leaves the app we remove cookies, sign-in tokens, IP addresses, query strings and request contents. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a working app (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

9. Product statistics

We count a few events with PostHog (EU data region): the start page or a shared card was opened (without its address or what the card shows), a vote was cast (with the battle type and whether the account has an email), an account was upgraded or signed in, a photo was uploaded, a card was shared (and how: the share menu, a copied link or a saved image; and whether from the Share button or from the congratulation on an open rank, a new tier or a new Peak Elo), and a player joined through a shared card. Events carry a pseudonymous identifier (a one-way hash of your account id) once you have an account, never your email or name. PostHog sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser, records no other page views and no screen recordings, and is set to discard IP addresses. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding whether the game works (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). You may object at any time (section 12).

10. Cookies and browser storage

We only use storage that the service needs to work: the sign-in session cookies, the beta invite pass, and your chosen battle type. We use no advertising or tracking cookies, so we do not ask for cookie consent (§ 25(2) TDDDG).

Cloudflare Turnstile runs a short check in your browser before an account is created and on the contact form. It processes your IP address and technical browser signals to tell people from bots.

11. Who receives data

We use the following service providers. They process data only on our instructions under data processing agreements:

  • Vercel Inc. (USA): hosting of the website and of our server code (server code runs in Dublin, Ireland; pages are delivered through Vercel's worldwide network).
  • Supabase Inc. (USA): database, sign-in and photo storage (data stored in Ireland (AWS eu-west-1)).
  • Resend Inc. (USA): sending sign-in emails (USA).
  • Cloudflare Inc. (USA): Turnstile bot protection before an account is created and on the contact form (Cloudflare's worldwide network).
  • Functional Software Inc. (Sentry, USA): error reports (EU data region (Germany)).
  • PostHog Inc. (USA): counting a few product events (EU data region (Germany)).

These companies are based in the USA, so data may be transferred there. Such transfers rely on the EU adequacy decision for the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework where the company is certified, and otherwise on the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR). We do not sell personal data or share it with advertisers. We disclose data to authorities only where the law requires it.

12. How long we keep data

  • Account, profile, photos, battles and votes: until you delete your account.
  • Daily vote counts per IP hash: two days.
  • Contact form messages: 12 months after we have dealt with them.
  • Error reports and product statistics: at most 90 days and 12 months respectively.
  • Server logs of our hosting providers: a few days at most.

When you delete your account, we delete your profile, photos, image files, battles and votes. Reports you made and moderation logs about your photos stay without the link to your account.

13. Your rights

You have the right to:

  • access your data and get a copy of it (Art. 15 GDPR);
  • have wrong data corrected (Art. 16 GDPR);
  • have your data deleted, including your whole account (Art. 17 GDPR);
  • restrict processing (Art. 18 GDPR);
  • receive your data in a machine-readable format (Art. 20 GDPR);
  • object at any time to processing based on our legitimate interests, for reasons arising from your situation (Art. 21 GDPR);
  • ask for a person to review an automatic decision about your photo.

Write to [email protected] from the email address of your account, so we can tell that the request is yours. We answer within one month.

You may also complain to a data protection supervisory authority. The authority responsible for us is the Unabhängiges Datenschutzzentrum Saarland, Fritz-Dobisch-Straße 12, 66111 Saarbrücken, Germany (datenschutz.saarland.de).

14. Do you have to give us data?

You can vote without telling us who you are. An email address is needed only to upload photos; without it you cannot upload.

15. 18+ only

LookSmash is only for people aged 18 or older. If you believe a minor uses LookSmash or appears in a photo, please tell us through the contact form.

16. Changes

We update this policy when the app changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change affects you significantly, we tell you in the app.