How to choose a face search service

1. What happens to your photo

This comes first because a face photo is biometric data, protected far more tightly than ordinary personal data.

Look for three things in the privacy policy: how long the photo is kept, whether you can delete it, and whether your upload gets added to the service's own index. The third one matters most — some services fold your photo into the searchable pool, which means you have helped anyone who later searches for you.

If the policy does not answer it plainly, assume you would not like the answer.

2. The pricing model

There are two: subscription, or pay per search. Which is better depends entirely on you.

For checking one person, a subscription is expensive and easy to forget to cancel — a meaningful share of revenue in this sector comes from exactly that. For regular research, a subscription works out cheaper.

Check: does it auto-renew, how many clicks is cancelling, and does a trial quietly roll into a paid plan.

3. How big the index is, and what it covers

The number alone means little. "Billions of faces" says nothing until you know where those faces came from.

Private accounts, pages behind logins and unindexed sites are outside every service's reach. A service telling you it searches the whole internet is not being straight with you.

4. How results are presented

A good report gives you three things: a direct link to the source page, a thumbnail of the matched image, and a similarity score.

Without a score you cannot tell which result to take seriously. Without a link you cannot verify the finding — a screenshot is not evidence.

5. What they promise

This is the most revealing one. Face search measures similarity; it does not confirm identity. A service telling you to "find out who this person is" is promising something it cannot deliver.

Siblings, relatives and occasionally unrelated people score highly, and no system meaningfully separates identical twins. The service that tells you this up front is the one that will not disappoint you later.

Warning signs

Walk away if you see any of these:

• No privacy policy, or one that never says how long photos are kept.
• No contact details at all — who do you write to when something goes wrong?
• Promises to "reveal their identity" or find a name and address.
• Nothing visible before payment, and an unclear refund position.
• Marketed for hiring or tenant screening, which is illegal in most jurisdictions.