Privacy Policy

Effective date: 3 September 2026

Picca is a local desktop application. In ordinary use we (the publisher) do not collect, receive, host, or sell your photographs, tags, captions, GPS coordinates, or face data. All processing happens on your computer. You control your files.

If we ever add an optional cloud account or telemetry, we will update this notice before any data leaves your device.

1. Who is responsible for the data?

Your photo library. You (or your organisation) decide which folders Picca indexes. You are typically the controller of that personal data under UK GDPR / EU GDPR, because it stays on your equipment and we cannot access it.

The publisher. We supply the software. We are not given a copy of your catalogue. We are not a processor of your face embeddings unless you separately send us files (for example, a support email you choose to send).

2. What Picca stores on your computer

Picca stores catalogue data in a local folder (typically .catalogue-data beside your photo library), including:

Data	Purpose
Paths, file names, sizes, thumbnails	Browse and search your library
Tags, captions, albums	Organisation you create
GPS coordinates (from photo metadata or map tools)	Map view and place tagging
Face boxes, suggested names, and face embeddings	Optional people grouping
Face "profiles" (sample embeddings per named person)	Matching new photos to names you confirmed
Downloaded AI model files	Face detection/recognition and optional local vision tagging
Cached map tiles	Offline map display

Original photo files stay where you put them. Picca does not copy your library into a vendor cloud.

3. Face embeddings (biometric data)

When you run face detection, Picca:

1. Detects face-like regions in photos (YuNet on GPU if available, otherwise SeetaFace on CPU).
2. Computes a numeric embedding (SFace) for each face.
3. Stores that embedding in the local SQLite database, with a bounding box on the image.
4. May compare new embeddings to people you have named and suggest or auto-apply a face: tag.

This is biometric data when it can be used to distinguish people (UK GDPR / EU GDPR Article 9 "special category"; UK Data Protection Act 2018; and similar rules such as Illinois BIPA, which treats face geometry as biometric identifiers).

It is not identity verification. Embeddings are for sorting your pictures. They are not a government ID check and they can mis-identify people.

Lawful basis (UK / EU)

If GDPR applies to your use of Picca (for example, a business cataloguing staff or customer photos):

• You need a lawful basis for ordinary personal data (often legitimate interests in organising your own files, or consent).
• For biometric data used to uniquely identify someone, you typically need explicit consent or another Article 9 condition.

If you only catalogue your own family photos on a home PC, you may fall outside GDPR "household" limits in some situations — but you should still treat other people's faces with care.

Illinois BIPA-style notice

Picca's publisher does not collect, capture, or store your biometrics on our servers, does not sell, lease, trade, or otherwise disclose biometric data to third parties, and does not profit from sharing face templates, because those templates never leave your machine in ordinary use.

If you use face features, you (the operator of the PC) are the party that possesses the embeddings on disk. You should:

• Tell people whose faces you index, where the law requires it.
• Keep the catalogue folder secure.
• Delete embeddings when you no longer need them (see section 6).

Retention / destruction schedule: embeddings and face profiles are kept on your computer until you delete them via Edit → Delete all face data…, delete the catalogue database, or remove the .catalogue-data folder. There is no automatic upload and no vendor-side retention.

4. What can leave your computer

These are not face embeddings or your photo library:

Activity	What is sent	Destination
First-time model download	HTTP request for public model files (no photos)	GitHub, Hugging Face, or similar CDNs
Map tiles	Tile coordinates (z/x/y), not photos	OpenStreetMap tile servers
Place search on the map	The search text you type	OpenStreetMap Nominatim
Optional Ollama fallback	Cropped image for tagging (if you run Ollama locally)	Your local Ollama process (127.0.0.1)

We do not sell this information. OpenStreetMap's own privacy terms apply to their services.

5. We do not sell your data

We do not sell personal data or biometric data. We do not use your catalogue for advertising. We do not train our own models on your photos (we never receive them).

Third-party model authors trained YuNet, SFace, Moondream2, and similar models on their own datasets before you downloaded the weights. That training is described by those projects, not by Picca, and does not use your library.

6. Your rights and how to delete face data

Under UK GDPR / EU GDPR, where they apply, people may have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, and complaint to the ICO (or another EU authority). Because we do not hold your catalogue, you exercise erasure on the device:

• All face data: Edit → Delete all face data… — photo files remain on disk.
• One detection: reject that face in the confirmation panel.
• Whole catalogue: delete or replace the .catalogue-data folder.
• Uninstall: removing Picca does not always delete .catalogue-data; delete that folder if you want local catalogue data gone.

7. Children

Picca is not directed at children. Do not use face detection on photos of children unless you have a lawful basis (parental responsibility, consent, or another ground the law allows).

8. Security

Data protection is as strong as your PC, disk encryption, backups, and who can access the catalogue folder. Treat .catalogue-data as sensitive: it can contain biometric templates and a full index of your photos.

9. International transfers

We do not transfer your catalogue. If you download models or map tiles, those connections go to wherever those public hosts are located (often outside the UK). That is ordinary HTTPS download / map use, not a transfer of your photo library.

10. Changes

We will update this policy if Picca's data practices change. The effective date at the top will be updated accordingly.

11. Contact

For the software: the seller named at purchase.
For UK data-protection complaints: Information Commissioner's Office.
For Illinois BIPA questions about your local copy of embeddings: you hold that copy; we do not.